This is a simple Universal Resource Locator (URL) parser package for Common Lisp. It depends on my re, lexer, parse, and base64 packages.
Parsing a URL is as simple as using url-parse:
(url-parse string &rest initargs)
The initargs allows you to override any of the initargs of the url class that would normally have been set by url-parse.
CL-USER > (url-parse "google.com")
http://google.com/
Notice how the output is the URL and not formatted like a typical unreadable object. This is because you'll often want to output a URL to the end user. This way, you can use all Common Lisp functions to print a URL (format, print, princ, prin1, etc.) and see it plainly.
CL-USER > (url-parse "google.com" :path "/index.html")
http://google.com/index.html
Once you have a URL, you can create a copy using url-parse as well, using the exact same initargs to generate a new URL that's the same, only with changes...
CL-USER > (url-parse * :scheme "https")
https://google.com/?s=common+lisp
A helpful macro to work with URLs is the with-url macro. It's simply a wrapper around url-parse.
(with-url (var url-form &rest initargs) &body body)
URLs can be compared with url-equal. It returns T if all the slots of the URL are always equal: scheme, auth, domain, port, path, query, and fragment. For the query parameters, the order of them needn't be in the same order. They also can be encoded differently.
CL-USER > (url-equal (url-parse "www.foo.com/?a=1&b=this+that")
(url-parse "www.foo.com/?b=this%20that&a=1"))
T
Encoding and decoding URL strings can be done with the url-encode and url-decode functions:
(url-encode string)
(url-decode string)
These will handle escaping of characters properly so they can be used within a URL.
CL-USER > (url-encode "Common Lisp ROCKS!")
"Common%20Lisp%20ROCKS%21"
CL-USER > (url-decode *)
"Common Lisp Rocks!"
Note: In addition to url-encode, there is also url-format, which allows you not only to encode to a stream, but is built for use inside of format with ~/.
You can also construct and deconstruct query strings in URLs to and from associative lists.
CL-USER > (parse-query-string "q=common+lisp&rocks=true")
(("q" "common lisp") ("rocks" "true"))
CL-USER > (make-query-string *)
"q=common%20lisp&rocks=true"
Note: When constructing a URL via make-instance or url-parse, the query initarg requires an associative list of key/value pairs. If you have the query string, use parse-query-string to get the associative list.
The URL accessor functions are:
(url-scheme url) ;=> string (e.g. "http")
(url-auth url) ;=> nil or list ("username" "password")
(url-domain url) ;=> string (e.g. "www.google.com")
(url-port url) ;=> fixnum (e.g. 80)
(url-path url) ;=> string (e.g. "/")
(url-query url) ;=> string (e.g. "foo=bar&hidden")
(url-fragment url) ;=> string (e.g. "anchor")
That's it!