How to extract the hostname portion of a URL in JavaScript

suppose that you have a page with this address: http://sub.domain.com/virtualPath/page.htm. use the following in page code to achieve those results:

  • window.location.host : you'll get sub.domain.com:8080 or sub.domain.com:80
  • window.location.hostname : you'll get sub.domain.com
  • window.location.protocol : you'll get http:
  • window.location.port : you'll get 8080 or 80
  • window.location.pathname : you'll get /virtualPath
  • window.location.origin : you'll get http://sub.domain.com *****

Update: about the .origin

***** As the ref states, browser compatibility for window.location.origin is not clear. I've checked it in chrome and it returned http://sub.domain.com:port if the port is anything but 80, and http://sub.domain.com if the port is 80.

Special thanks to @torazaburo for mentioning that to me.


You could concatenate the location protocol and the host:

var root = location.protocol + '//' + location.host;

For a url, let say 'http://stackoverflow.com/questions', it will return 'http://stackoverflow.com'