new URL() – WHATWG URL API

As Joshua Wise pointed out on Github (https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/12682), the problem is that request.url is NOT an absolute URL. It can be used as a path or relative URL, but it is missing the host and protocol.

Following the API documentation, you can construct a valid URL by supplying a base URL as the second argument. This is still awkward because the protocol is not easily available from request.headers. I simply assumed HTTP:

var baseURL = 'http://' + request.headers.host + "https://stackoverflow.com/";
var myURL = new URL(request.url, baseURL);

This is obviously not an ideal solution, but at least you can take advantage of the query string parsing. For example,

URL {
  href: 'http://localhost:8080/?key1=value1&key2=value2',
  origin: 'http://localhost:8080',
  protocol: 'http:',
  username: '',
  password: '',
  host: 'localhost:8080',
  hostname: 'localhost',
  port: '8080',
  pathname: "https://stackoverflow.com/",
  search: '?key1=value1&key2=value2',
  searchParams: URLSearchParams { 'key1' => 'value1', 'key2' => 'value2' },
  hash: '' }