RFC 3986 URL Parsing Regular Expression (JavaScript)

parseurl.js

/* ***********************************************************************************
	Hero authors of RFC 3986 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt) gave us this regex 
	for parsing (well-formed) URLs into their constituent pieces:

	^(([^:/?#]+):)?(//([^/?#]*))?([^?#]*)(\?([^#]*))?(#(.*))?

	Which for the following URL:

	http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/uri/#Related

	Yields the following subexpression matches:

	 $1 = http:
	 $2 = http
	 $3 = //www.ics.uci.edu
	 $4 = www.ics.uci.edu
	 $5 = /pub/ietf/uri/
	 $6 = <undefined>
	 $7 = <undefined>
	 $8 = #Related
	 $9 = Related

	where <undefined> indicates that the component is not present, as is
	the case for the query component in the above example.  Therefore, we
	can determine the value of the five components as

	 scheme    = $2
	 authority = $4
	 path      = $5
	 query     = $7
	 fragment  = $9
*********************************************************************************** */
var parseURL = function( url ) {
	var regex = RegExp("^(([^:/?#]+):)?(//([^/?#]*))?([^?#]*)(\\?([^#]*))?(#(.*))?");
	var matches =  url.match(regex);
	return {
		scheme: matches[2],
		authority: matches[4],
		path: matches[5],
		query: matches[7],
		fragment: matches[9]
	};
}