Extract hostname name from string

A neat trick without using regular expressions:

var tmp        = document.createElement ('a');
;   tmp.href   = "http://www.example.com/12xy45";

// tmp.hostname will now contain 'www.example.com'
// tmp.host will now contain hostname and port 'www.example.com:80'

Wrap the above in a function such as the below and you have yourself a superb way of snatching the domain part out of an URI.

function url_domain(data) {
  var    a      = document.createElement('a');
         a.href = data;
  return a.hostname;
}