Ada is a fast and spec-compliant URL parser written in C++. Specification for URL parser can be found from the WHATWG website.

The Ada library passes the full range of tests from the specification, across a wide range of platforms (e.g., Windows, Linux, macOS). It fully supports the relevant Unicode Technical Standard.

A common use of a URL parser is to take a URL string and normalize it. The WHATWG URL specification has been adopted by most browsers. Other tools, such as curl and many standard libraries, follow the RFC 3986. The following table illustrates possible differences in practice (encoding of the host, encoding of the path):

The project is otherwise self-contained and it has no dependency. A recent C++ compiler supporting C++17. We test GCC 9 or better, LLVM 10 or better and Microsoft Visual Studio 2022.

On a benchmark where we need to validate and normalize thousands URLs found on popular websites, we find that ada can be several times faster than popular competitors (system: Apple MacBook 2022 with LLVM 14).

      ada ▏  188 ns/URL ███▏
servo url ▏  664 ns/URL ███████████▎
     CURL ▏ 1471 ns/URL █████████████████████████

Ada has improved the performance of the popular JavaScript environment Node.js:

Since Node.js 18, a new URL parser dependency was added to Node.js — Ada. This addition bumped the Node.js performance when parsing URLs to a new level. Some results could reach up to an improvement of 400%. (State of Node.js Performance 2023)

The Ada library is used by important systems besides Node.js such as Redpanda and Cloudflare Workers.

Linux or macOS users might follow the following instructions if they have a recent C++ compiler installed and a standard utility (wget)

1. Pull the library in a directory

   wget https://github.com/ada-url/ada/releases/download/v2.6.10/ada.cpp
   wget https://github.com/ada-url/ada/releases/download/v2.6.10/ada.h
   

2. Create a new file named demo.cpp with this content:

    #include "ada.cpp"
    #include "ada.h"
    #include <iostream>
   
    int main(int, char *[]) {
      auto url = ada::parse<ada::url>("https://www.google.com");
      if (!url) {
        std::cout << "failure" << std::endl;
        return EXIT_FAILURE;
      }
      url->set_protocol("http");
      std::cout << url->get_protocol() << std::endl;
      std::cout << url->get_host() << std::endl;
      return EXIT_SUCCESS;
    }

3. Compile

   c++ -std=c++17 -o demo demo.cpp
   

4. ./demo

   http:
   www.google.com
   

We provide clients for different programming languages through our C API.

• Rust: Rust bindings for Ada
• Go: Go bindings for Ada
• Python: Python bindings for Ada
• R: R wrapper for Ada

Ada supports two types of URL instances, ada::url and ada::url_aggregator. The usage is the same in either case: we have an parsing function template ada::parse which can return either a result of type ada::result<ada::url> or of type ada::result<ada::url_aggregator> depending on your needs. The ada::url_aggregator class is smaller and it is backed by a precomputed serialized URL string. The ada::url class is made of several separate strings for the various components (path, host, and so forth).

• Parse and validate a URL from an ASCII or UTF-8 string

ada::result<ada::url_aggregator> url = ada::parse<ada::url_aggregator>("https://www.google.com");
if (url) { /* URL is valid */ }

After calling 'parse', you must check that the result is valid before accessing it when you are not sure that it will succeed. The following code is unsafe:

ada::result<ada::url_aggregator> url = ada::parse<ada::url_aggregator>("some bad url");
url->get_href();

You should do...

ada::result<ada::url_aggregator> url = ada::parse<ada::url_aggregator>("some bad url");
if(url) {
  // next line is now safe:
  url->get_href();
} else {
  // report a parsing failure
}

For simplicity, in the examples below, we skip the check because we know that parsing succeeds.

• Get/Update credentials

ada::result<ada::url_aggregator> url = ada::parse<ada::url_aggregator>("https://www.google.com");
url->set_username("username");
url->set_password("password");
// ada->get_href() will return "https://username:password@www.google.com/"

• Get/Update Protocol

ada::result<ada::url_aggregator> url = ada::parse<ada::url_aggregator>("https://www.google.com");
url->set_protocol("wss");
// url->get_protocol() will return "wss:"
// url->get_href() will return "wss://www.google.com/"

• Get/Update host

ada::result<ada::url_aggregator> url = ada::parse<ada::url_aggregator>("https://www.google.com");
url->set_host("github.com");
// url->get_host() will return "github.com"
// you can use `url.set_hostname` depending on your usage.

• Get/Update port

ada::result<ada::url_aggregator> url = ada::parse<ada::url_aggregator>("https://www.google.com");
url->set_port("8080");
// url->get_port() will return "8080"

• Get/Update pathname

ada::result<ada::url_aggregator> url = ada::parse<ada::url_aggregator>("https://www.google.com");
url->set_pathname("/my-super-long-path")
// url->get_pathname() will return "/my-super-long-path"

• Get/Update search/query

ada::result<ada::url_aggregator> url = ada::parse<ada::url_aggregator>("https://www.google.com");
url->set_search("target=self");
// url->get_search() will return "?target=self"

• Get/Update hash/fragment

ada::result<ada::url_aggregator> url = ada::parse<ada::url_aggregator>("https://www.google.com");
url->set_hash("is-this-the-real-life");
// url->get_hash() will return "#is-this-the-real-life"

For more information about command-line options, please refer to the CLI documentation.

• URL search params

ada::url_search_params search_params("a=b&c=d&e=f");
search_params.append("g=h");

search_params.get("g");  // will return "h"

auto keys = search_params.get_keys();
while (keys.has_next()) {
  auto key = keys.next();  // "a", "c", "e", "g"
}

See the file include/ada_c.h for our C interface. We expect ASCII or UTF-8 strings.

#include "ada_c.h"
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdbool.h>

static void ada_print(ada_string string) {
  printf("%.*s\n", (int)string.length, string.data);
}

int main(int c, char *arg[] ) {
  ada_url url = ada_parse("https://username:password@www.google.com:8080/"
      "pathname?query=true#hash-exists");
  if(!ada_is_valid(url)) { puts("failure"); return EXIT_FAILURE; }
  ada_print(ada_get_href(url)); // prints https://username:password@host:8080/pathname?query=true#hash-exists
  ada_print(ada_get_protocol(url)); // prints https:
  ada_print(ada_get_username(url)); // prints username
  ada_set_href(url, "https://www.yagiz.co");
  if(!ada_is_valid(url)) { puts("failure"); return EXIT_FAILURE; }
  ada_set_hash(url, "new-hash");
  ada_set_hostname(url, "new-host");
  ada_set_host(url, "changed-host:9090");
  ada_set_pathname(url, "new-pathname");
  ada_set_search(url, "new-search");
  ada_set_protocol(url, "wss");
  ada_print(ada_get_href(url)); // will print wss://changed-host:9090/new-pathname?new-search#new-hash

  // Manipulating search params
  ada_string search = ada_get_search(url);
  ada_url_search_params search_params =
      ada_parse_search_params(search.data, search.length);
  ada_search_params_append(search_params, "a", 1, "b", 1);
  ada_owned_string result = ada_search_params_to_string(search_params);
  ada_set_search(url, result.data, result.length);
  ada_free_owned_string(result);
  ada_free_search_params(search_params);

  ada_free(url);
  return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

When linking against the ada library from C++, be minding that ada requires access to the standard C++ library. E.g., you may link with the C++ compiler.

E.g., if you grab our single-header C++ files (ada.cpp and ada.h), as well as the C header (ada_c.h), you can often compile a C program (demo.c) as follows under Linux/macOS systems:

c++ -c ada.cpp -std=c++17
cc -c demo.c
c++ demo.o ada.o -o cdemo
./cdemo

See the file tests/installation/CMakeLists.txt for an example of how you might use ada from your own CMake project, after having installed ada on your system.

Ada is available through Homebrew. You can install Ada using brew install ada-url.

Ada uses cmake as a build system. It's recommended you to run the following commands to build it locally.

• Build: cmake -B build && cmake --build build
• Test: ctest --output-on-failure --test-dir build

Windows users need additional flags to specify the build configuration, e.g. --config Release.

The project can also be built via docker using default docker file of repository with following commands.

docker build -t ada-builder . && docker run --rm -it -v ${PWD}:/repo ada-builder

You may amalgamate all source files into only two files (ada.h and ada.cpp) by typing executing the Python 3 script singleheader/amalgamate.py. By default, the files are created in the singleheader directory.

This code is made available under the Apache License 2.0 as well as the MIT license.

Our tests include third-party code and data. The benchmarking code includes third-party code: it is provided for research purposes only and not part of the library.

• Yagiz Nizipli, Daniel Lemire, Parsing Millions of URLs per Second, Software: Practice and Experience 54(5) May 2024.