Regex to find id in url

Question

I have the following URL:

http://example.com/product/1/something/another-thing

Although it can also be:

http://test.example.com/product/1/something/another-thing

or

http://completelydifferentdomain.tdl/product/1/something/another-thing

And I want to get the number 1 (id) from the URL using Javascript.

The only thing that would always be the same is /product. But I have some other pages where there is also /product in the url just not at the start of the path.

What would the regex look like?

Solution 1

1. Use window.location.pathname to retrieve the current path (excluding TLD).

2. Use the JavaScript string match method.

3. Use the regex /^\/product\/(\d+)/ to find a path which starts with /product/, then one or more digits (add i right at the end to support case insensitivity).

4. Come up with something like this:

   var res = window.location.pathname.match(/^\/product\/(\d+)/);
   if (res.length == 2) {
       // use res[1] to get the id.
   }
   

Solution 2

/\/product\/(\d+)/ and obtain $1.

Solution 3

Just, as an alternative, to do this without Regex (though i admit regex is awfully nice here)

var url = "http://test.example.com//mypage/1/test/test//test";
var newurl = url.replace("http://","").split("/");
for(i=0;i<newurl.length;i++) {
    if(newurl[i] == "") {
     newurl.splice(i,1);   //this for loop takes care of situatiosn where there may be a // or /// instead of a /
    }
}
alert(newurl[2]); //returns 1

Comments

[PeeHaa]

does the search string in the replace function accept an array? For the case I want to go for https:// in the future?

[PeeHaa]

wouldn't that also get: example.com/something/product/something-else/another-thing ?

[Thomas Shields]

@PeeHaa not that i know of, but naturally you can chain another replace function on there url.replace("http://","").replace("https://","")...

[PeeHaa]

@Jonathon: sorry for bad example. Wouldn't that also get: example.com/something/product/1/another-thing? :P