jQuery to parse our a part of a url path

Question

I need to parse long urls and set a variable (category) equal to one of the /folders/ in the path.

For example, a url that is

http://example.

Answer 1

You can fetch everything after the "/community/" with a regular expression:

var url = "http://www.example.com/community/whatever";
var category = "";
var matches = url.match(/\/community\/(.*)$/);
if (matches) {
    category = matches[1];   // "whatever"
}

Working example here: http://jsfiddle.net/jfriend00/BL4jm/

If you want to get only the next path segment after community and nothing after that segment, then you could use this:

var url = "http://www.example.com/community/whatever/more";
var category = "";
var matches = url.match(/\/community\/([^\/]+)/);
if (matches) {
    category = matches[1];    // "whatever"
} else {
    // no match for the category
}

Workikng example of this one here:http://jsfiddle.net/jfriend00/vrvbT/

Answer 2

When you do this.href*= you're doing multiplication, and that's why you're getting not-a-number. It multiplies this.href by the string and assigns that to href.

If you mean to test whether the url starts with that string you can do it like this, no need for jQuery:

var start = 'http://example.com/community/';
if (url.substring(0, start.length) === start)){
  var category = url.split("community/");
  var lastPart = category[category.length - 1];
  return lastPart.split("/")[0];
}