PHP 8.5's New URI Extension: Parsing URLs Without the parse_url() Footguns

PHP 8.5 ships a real URL parser. Here's where parse_url() lies, and how the RFC 3986 and WHATWG classes fix it in an adapter.

giovedì 2 luglio 2026 New tab

1,502 words~7 min read

Book: Decoupled PHP — Clean and Hexagonal Architecture for Applications That Outlive the Framework

Also by me: Thinking in Go (2-book series) — Complete Guide to Go Programming + Hexagonal Architecture in Go

My project: Hermes IDE | GitHub — an IDE for developers who ship with Claude Code and other AI coding tools

Me: xgabriel.com | GitHub

parse_url() has been in PHP since PHP 4. It follows neither RFC 3986 nor the WHATWG URL standard. It splits a string on characters that look like URL delimiters and hands you an array. That's the whole contract.

PHP 8.5's New URI Extension: Parsing URLs Without the parse_url() Footguns

PHP 8.5's New URI Extension: Parsing URLs Without the parse_url() Footguns

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