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Kevin Pauli
Kevin Pauli

Reputation: 8885

What is the term for the last part of the path of a URL

What term do you give the part of the url after the last slash, but before the query? It seems most places people call it "the last part of the path" e.g. here but that is just so... wordy.

E.g. "something" in this url:

http://www.example.com/path/to/something?param=foo

Update:

I was hoping there was a well-known answer that I was not aware of, but it seems there is still some debate so, that's my answer right there. Guess I'll just keep calling it "the part of the path after the last slash". But I'll leave this question open anway, in case someone makes a convincing argument that gets lots of upvotes.

Upvotes: 12

Views: 18966

Answers (6)

tommy
tommy

Reputation: 81

I'm a bit late to the party, but where I work we call it the slug, as mentioned here for example: https://prettylinks.com/2018/03/url-slugs/

Upvotes: 8

Rodrigo García
Rodrigo García

Reputation: 1417

I found the terms "last segment" or "last chunk" quite accurate and succinct.

Upvotes: 2

Anon
Anon

Reputation: 2492

I saw a few uncertain suggestions here and there, including "filename", "basename". The Qt project has these names in their lexicon, so it can serve as a standard.

Namely check out the QFileInfo class.

They have standardized the names as the following:

QFileInfo fi("/tmp/archive.tar.gz");

fi.fileName();         // "archive.tar.gz"
fi.baseName();         // "archive"
fi.completeBaseName(); // "archive.tar"
fi.suffix();           // "gz"
fi.completeSuffix();   // "tar.gz"

This is a specification for local files however, so in this standard, there is a departure from basic URI terminology here:

fi.path();             // "/tmp"
fi.filePath();         // "/tmp/archive.tar.gz"

Where as in QUrl, you have path & fileName

QUrl("file:file.txt").path();                   // "file.txt"
QUrl("/home/user/file.txt").path();             // "/home/user/file.txt"
QUrl("http://www.example.com/test/123").path(); // "/test/123"

and

QUrl("file:file.txt").fileName();                   // "file.txt"
QUrl("/home/user/file.txt").fileName();             // "file.txt"
QUrl("http://www.example.com/test/123").fileName(); // "123"

If I were building a library, I personally would adopt QFileInfo terminology and apply to both URI and local files, and hope the entire rest of the world has enough sense to follow me.

Upvotes: 0

Lara Haehle
Lara Haehle

Reputation: 1

In my experience it is called a query string whenever it is instructing action on the website. Code is frequently written to address the query string, which would prompt customized results on the page.

Otherwise, I agree it would be called a file name, if the path was referencing a file.

Upvotes: 0

Paul Sullivan
Paul Sullivan

Reputation: 2875

protocol://server.domain/path?query

The path element (and it appears there is no 'defacto' definition) in my mind is the path to the resource on the server. No matter whether the resource is a file (blah.html) or a folder (/path/) it still instructs the server to use the path to find the resource.

Now there appears to be another definition at good/bad ol' Wikipedia here which states that it is usually "http://server/path/program?query_string" where the end resource is defined as 'program' but I think this is incorrect (is a folder a program?)

So.. perhaps its should be 

protocol://server.domain/path[/resource.*]?query

? /../../ I traverse...

Upvotes: 6

Aamir Abro
Aamir Abro

Reputation: 858

If URL is like /path/to/file.html or example.com/path/to/something.php?param=foo

then I think we can call it filename as mentioned at http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/directive-dict.html

Upvotes: 3

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