Test code:

var start = +new Date, x = 2000;
while(--x){
  parseURL('http://abc.com:8080/dir/index.html?id=255&m=hello#top');
}
console.log('parseURL: ',+new Date - start);
 
 
var start = +new Date, x = 2000;
while(--x){
  parseUri('http://abc.com:8080/dir/index.html?id=255&m=hello#top');
}
console.log('parseUri: ',+new Date - start);

Results
Firefox 3:
parseURL: 541
parseUri: 157

IE 6:
parseURL: 781
parseUri: 312

Chrome 1:
parseURL: 498
parseUri: 242

So the regex is faster, but I’m still quite fond of the DOM approach. :-]

Like almost everything I write about, this was just a bit of an experiment. Feature-wise it certainly does not match up to Steven’s work.

@Steven, thanks for the correction on the tp/tps thing. For my test I used a typical scenario – waiting to retrieve all the parts of a URL. It’s worth mentioning that I didn’t test against your original version; I tested against Mark’s jQuery port which was very slow in comparison to my above attempt. Although, like you said, the results are invalidated because of the inherent differences of the returned results.

@Mark, Oddly Steven’s original version is faster than yours because it returns all the information as properties while yours requires each bit of info to be initiated as a method in order to retrieve results. Doing this is probably adding overhead.

I played around with this DOM-based approach a couple years ago based on a comment on my parseUri post, but I don’t think this approach can offer all the same functionality (strict vs. loose parsing, all parts being optional, etc.) in comparable code length. Note that this function will incorrectly (IMO) return the protocol, host, port, and path of the page running the script if those segments are not included in the URI passed to the function (e.g., with parseURL(“?q=v”)).

@James Padolsey, the regex used for the “relative” property currently only works with protocols that end with “tp” (e.g., not “https”).

Great work. Never occurred to me that you could use the parse a URL in this way, and I have to say it is a much neater implementation (and faster too, as you say!) than my plugin. Good stuff! Looks like it’s back to using someone elses code for my url parsing 🙂

@Paul Irish – I would imagine that the speed difference would be about 12 times, as Stephens parseUri function forms the core of my jQuery URL Parser plugin that James’ comparison references.