use anchor tags to parse URLs into components

annotated.js

function(
  a // an anchor element
){
  return function( // return a function
    b,             // that takes a URL.
    c,             // (placeholder)
    d              // (placeholder)
  ){
    a.href = b;    // set the target of the link to the URL, and
    c = {};        // create a hash to be returned.
    for (          // for each
      d            // property
      in a         // of the anchor,
    ) if (         // if
      "" + a[d]    // the string version of the property
      === a[d]     // is the same as the property
    ) c[d]         // add it
      = a[d];      // to the return object
    
    return c       // return the object
  }
}(
  document         // auto-run with
    .createElement // a cached anchor element
    ("a")
)

index.js

function(a){return function(b,c,d){a.href=b;c={};for(d in a)if(""+a[d]===a[d])c[d]=a[d];return c}}(document.createElement("a"))

LICENSE.txt

            DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
                    Version 2, December 2004

 Copyright (C) 2011 Jed Schmidt <http://jed.is>

 Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified
 copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long
 as the name is changed.

            DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
   TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION

  0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.

package.json

{
  "name": "parseURL",
  "keywords": ["parse", "URL", "link"]
}

How about rewriting typeof a[d]=="string" as ""+a[d]===a[d]?

Whoops, looks like that would throw Uncaught TypeError: Cannot convert object to primitive value for the dataset property in Chrome. Seems to work fine in Opera and Firefox though. Chrome bug: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=59994

changed, thanks!

but would love to have a better solution to this, so that i could only capture the url components and not everything else...

Parsing URL such method is not only parsing!
Browsers resolves urls relative to document, so this algorithm is "resolve+parse"

Not sure if this existed back then but URL?

new URL('https://google.com')
// => URL {hash: "", host: "google.com", hostname: "google.com", href: "https://google.com/", origin: "https://google.com", password: "", pathname: "/", port: "", protocol: "https:", search: "", searchParams: URLSearchParams {}, username: "", [[Prototype]]: URL}