Thank you for taking the time to write to us, but this is not
a bug. Please double-check the documentation available at
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a bug at http://bugs.php.net/how-to-report.php

> This function is not meant to validate the given URL, it only breaks it up into
> the above listed parts.

I don't need "validation". I need a function that claims to parse a URL to not parse the URL in a nonsensical way.

The documentation also says:

> Invalid characters are replaced by _

Which is not happening with the invalid character of '\'.

On a side note, perhaps returning FALSE is not the actual expected behavior, however I don't think the behavior as it currently exists is ideal for this scenario.

The underscores are only applied to control characters - guaranteed to be invalid everywhere. The docs should clarify that "invalid" does not consider what is allowed in each component.

> not parse the URL in a nonsensical way
parse_url tries to break the string into pieces in the most reasonable way it can figure. Mostly based on the presence of delimiters. Backslashes don't have significance, unlike : or / or ?, so they're ignored.

If you think that a "nonsensical way" is parsing a string without validation then a "sensical way" would be parsing it *with* validation, and parse_url is only designed to do half of that.

Parsing with validation is trivial:

function parse_valid_url($url, $component = -1) {
  return filter_var($url, FILTER_VALIDATE_URL) ? parse_url($url, $component) : false;
}

To be fair, I was thinking "sensible" would be to interpret the parts in the same way an error-correcting browser might interpret them. Otherwise, I'm not really sure what the purpose of a function like parse_url would be (since it couldn't even be used to necessarily get accurate URL parts and perform your own sanity validations).

I would agree that at the very least the documentation should be more clear, and you are correct that filter_var already provides a close enough approximation of what I'm looking for.

> To be fair, I was thinking "sensible" would be to interpret the
> parts in the same way an error-correcting browser might interpret
> them.

I agree that it would be nice to have such function, but it is
important to note that parse_url() also tries to parse incomplete
URLs, what browsers usually don't do.