regex - How to extract base URL from a string in JavaScript?

Question

I'm trying to find a relatively easy and reliable method to extract the base URL from a string variable using JavaScript (or jQuery).

For example, given something like:

http://www.sitename.com/article/2009/09/14/this-is-an-article/

I'd like to get:

http://www.sitename.com/

Is a regular expression the best bet? If so, what statement could I use to assign the base URL extracted from a given string to a new variable?

I've done some searching on this, but everything I find in the JavaScript world seems to revolve around gathering this information from the actual document URL using location.host or similar.

Answer 1

Edit: Some complain that it doesn't take into account protocol. So I decided to upgrade the code, since it is marked as answer. For those who like one-line-code... well sorry this why we use code minimizers, code should be human readable and this way is better... in my opinion.

var pathArray = "https://somedomain.com".split( '/' );
var protocol = pathArray[0];
var host = pathArray[2];
var url = protocol + '//' + host;

Or use Davids solution from below.