A handy Alfred Workflow to get just the domain name from a URL in your clipboard

A very, very, common thing that I find myself doing while working with web stuff is copying a long URL, but only needing the domain name part to paste into a terminal or elsewhere. It’s annoying to carefully select just part of the URL, and even more annoying to manually delete the parts I don’t need:

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I love automating and making little shortcuts to simplify repetitive tasks like this!

After wasting time trying to do this with regular expressions, Nick Plank pointed me in the right direction. All I needed was to programmatically divide the text up into groups using the forward slash as a separator, then grab the text in the third group. Here’s a visual:

You can see that the main domain part, the part I want, is the third group. This is because there are two slashes in a row after https://, so that group exists, but is empty. This methodology works great for my needs here, but I quickly realized I’d also have to check if my URL began with https:// or http:// because sometimes they don’t when they get copied, and in that case I would want to select the first grouping instead:

With the game plan set, it was time to write a tiny little bash script to try it out:

#!/bin/bash
clipboard=$(pbpaste)
start=$(echo $clipboard | cut -d/ -f1)

if [ $start = "https:" ] || [ $start = "http:" ]; then
	domain=$(echo -n $clipboard | cut -d/ -f3)
else
	domain=$(echo -n $start)
fi
echo -n $domain
echo -n $domain | pbcopy

The script basically just gets the contents of the clipboard using pbpaste and uses cut to divide the URL into parts using by the forward slash as the separator. If the URL starts with https: or http: it will grab the 3rd group of text, and if not it grabs the first group. Finally, it prints out the domain to the terminal, then uses pbcopy to copy the domain name to the clipboard.

This works well, but I don’t really want to have to open a separate terminal to use it all the time¹, so I used this script to make an Alfred workflow. Now I can trigger all of that automation by just typing ;domain anywhere on my Mac!

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If you’d find this useful, and you are an Alfred user, you can get my workflow here:

⬇️ Domain-snippet.alfredworkflow.zip

Pay no attention to the fact that my demo video shows me pasting this into a terminal, lol. I’m often pasting domain names into web pages or Slack as well! ↩︎