Go by Example

URL Parsing

Parse URLs into components and safely encode query values with net/url.

The net/url package separates a URL into components and safely encodes query parameters. Parsing alone does not establish that a URL is valid for your application.

url.Parse returns fields such as scheme, host, and path. URL.Query reads parameters, while url.Values.Encode escapes values when building a query string.

package main
 
import (
    "fmt"
    "net/url"
)
 
func main() {
    u, err := url.Parse("https://example.com/search?q=go")
    if err != nil {
        panic(err)
    }
    fmt.Println(u.Scheme, u.Host, u.Path, u.Query().Get("q"))
 
    params := url.Values{}
    params.Set("q", "go channels")
    fmt.Println(params.Encode())
}

In production

For outbound requests, validate the scheme and host against what the application permits; a syntactically parseable URL can still target an unsafe destination. Use url.Values for queries and url.PathEscape for individual path segments. Avoid concatenating untrusted strings into URLs.

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