What are URL components?

A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) consists of several parts defined by RFC 3986: the scheme (https), authority (user@host:port), path (/page), query (?key=value), and fragment (#section). Understanding these components is essential for web development, security auditing, and SEO. Each part serves a distinct purpose in how browsers and servers locate and deliver resources.

// JavaScript — extract URL components
const url = new URL("https://user:pass@api.example.com:8080/v1/users?active=true#top");
console.log(url.protocol);  // "https:"
console.log(url.hostname);  // "api.example.com"
console.log(url.port);      // "8080"
console.log(url.pathname);  // "/v1/users"
console.log(url.search);    // "?active=true"
console.log(url.hash);      // "#top"
console.log(url.origin);    // "https://api.example.com:8080"

# Python
from urllib.parse import urlparse
p = urlparse("https://api.example.com:8080/v1/users?active=true")
print(p.scheme, p.hostname, p.port, p.path)

Common use cases

Developers break down URLs to debug routing issues, verify redirect targets, inspect deep-link structures in mobile apps, and validate canonical URLs for SEO. Security engineers analyze URLs to detect phishing attempts with misleading subdomains or encoded characters. The tool is also helpful when constructing URLs programmatically in REST clients or automation scripts.