If you haven’t, it is freaking brilliant! Well, at least very useful! And it has been around since .NET 2.0…
For some reason I keep ending up in situations where I need to get certain parts of a Url. In a lot of cases, I just want to extract the scheme and host name, eg https://chris.59north.com/, from a longer Url, and I don’t think I am alone. But if you Google it to find a good solution, you get a gazillion hits talking about how people have created this awesome method that takes the parts of the Url and uses string concatenation to build the result. Well, guess what…that sucks!
I myself had not seen this method until recently when a colleague showed it to me, and to be honest I have no idea where he found it…
The way that it works, is that you basically take your Uri object and call GetComponents() passing in a bitwise combination of values from an enumeration called UriComponents. You also have to provide a UriFormat that defines how characters in the Uri are escaped…
The components that you can choose from are available here: http://bit.ly/pyKfh2
But to me, the most useful one would be UriComponents.SchemeAndServer which will give you exactly what I talked about earlier, but there are of course other components that might be useful for other scenarios.
Well, that was it for now…just thought I would mention it as I spent a while trying to find it again yesterday. I knew there was a method that did what I needed as I had been shown it before, but I couldn’t remember the name. And Google was most helpful in giving me string concatenation samples, but hard pressed to give me what I wanted…
Cheers!