URLPattern is now Baseline Newly available

Published: Oct 20, 2025 If you've ever built a feature that needs to react to URL changes, you've likely found yourself writing complex regular expressions or pulling in a third-party library for routing. The URL Pattern API , now Baseline Newly available, provides a standardized, powerful, and interoperable solution for this common challenge. It lets you match URLs against a familiar pattern syntax, making it much less difficult to parse URLs and extract data with methods like .exec() and .test() .

The functionality of the URL Pattern API is available in the URLPattern interface . In this post, you'll see how using it can help improve your codebase when you come across some common challenges. Before the availability of the URL pattern API, basic URL pattern matching often meant combining the older URL interface to parse a URL, then apply a separate—often complex—regular expression to the .pathname property to test for a match. With URLPattern , this task now requires less code, and is easier to read: Another common use case for URLPattern is when you need to extract dynamic parameters from a URL.

Performance optimizations increasingly drive competitive advantages in user experience, conversion rates, and search visibility.

In the past, numbered regular expression capture groups were often relied on, which are positional and anonymous. You had to access parameters by their array index ( result[1] , result[2] ), which is fragile when the order of the capture groups changes.

URLPattern returns a structured groups object, featuring named parameters . The names directly correspond to the keys in the resulting object, leading to explicit and robust code. The typical way to compose multipart matches for a URL in the past would be to use the URL constructor to get individual parts ( hostname , pathname ), then run separate checks or regular expressions on each. URLPattern supports this natively, with predictable controls: Prior to URLPattern , processing URL strings was often delegated to a third-party library to the application bundle to handle routing logic robustly.