nsIURL

The nsIURL interface provides convenience methods that further
break down the path portion of nsIURI:

http://host/directory/fileBaseName.fileExtension?query
http://host/directory/fileBaseName.fileExtension#ref
\ \ /
\ ———————–
\ | /
\ fileName /
—————————-
|
filePath

Methods

getCommonBaseSpec(aURIToCompare)

This method takes a uri and compares the two. The common uri portion
is returned as a string. The minimum common uri portion is the
protocol, and any of these if present: login, password, host and port
If no commonality is found, “” is returned. If they are identical, the
whole path with file/ref/etc. is returned. For file uris, it is
expected that the common spec would be at least “file:///” since ‘/’ is
a shared common root.

Examples:
this.spec aURIToCompare.spec result
1) http://mozilla.org/ http://www.mozilla.org/ “” 2) http://foo.com/bar/ ftp://foo.com/bar/ “” 3) http://foo.com:8080/ http://foo.com/bar/ “” 4) ftp://user@foo.com/ ftp://user:pw@foo.com/ “” 5) ftp://foo.com/bar/ ftp://foo.com/bar ftp://foo.com/
6) ftp://foo.com/bar/ ftp://foo.com/bar/b.html ftp://foo.com/bar/
7) http://foo.com/a.htm#i http://foo.com/b.htm http://foo.com/
8) ftp://foo.com/c.htm#i ftp://foo.com/c.htm ftp://foo.com/c.htm
9) file:///a/b/c.html file:///d/e/c.html file:///

getRelativeSpec(aURIToCompare)

This method tries to create a string which specifies the location of the
argument relative to |this|. If the argument and |this| are equal, the
method returns “”. If any of the URIs’ scheme, host, userpass, or port
don’t match, the method returns the full spec of the argument.

Examples:
this.spec aURIToCompare.spec result
1) http://mozilla.org/ http://www.mozilla.org/ http://www.mozilla.org/
2) http://mozilla.org/ http://www.mozilla.org http://www.mozilla.org/
3) http://foo.com/bar/ http://foo.com:80/bar/ “” 4) http://foo.com/ http://foo.com/a.htm#b a.html#b
5) http://foo.com/a/b/ http://foo.com/c ../../c

Attributes

filePath

The URL path is broken down into the following principal components:

Returns a path including the directory and file portions of a
URL. For example, the filePath of “http://host/foo/bar.html#baz”
is “/foo/bar.html”.

Some characters may be escaped.

query

Returns the query portion (the part after the “?”) of the URL.
If there isn’t one, an empty string is returned.

Some characters may be escaped.

directory

The URL filepath is broken down into the following sub-components:

Returns the directory portion of a URL. If the URL denotes a path to a
directory and not a file, e.g. http://host/foo/bar/, then the Directory
attribute accesses the complete /foo/bar/ portion, and the FileName is
the empty string. If the trailing slash is omitted, then the Directory
is /foo/ and the file is bar (i.e. this is a syntactic, not a semantic
breakdown of the Path). And hence don’t rely on this for something to
be a definitely be a file. But you can get just the leading directory
portion for sure.

Some characters may be escaped.

fileName

Returns the file name portion of a URL. If the URL denotes a path to a
directory and not a file, e.g. http://host/foo/bar/, then the Directory
attribute accesses the complete /foo/bar/ portion, and the FileName is
the empty string. Note that this is purely based on searching for the
last trailing slash. And hence don’t rely on this to be a definite file.

Some characters may be escaped.

fileBaseName

The URL filename is broken down even further:

Returns the file basename portion of a filename in a url.

Some characters may be escaped.

fileExtension

Returns the file extension portion of a filename in a url. If a file
extension does not exist, the empty string is returned.

Some characters may be escaped.