Get path of the Firebase reference

Question

How to get the Firebase path (location string without the hostname part such as "users/user1") given the Firebase reference? I can't find in the docs and tried to search but no luck.

Now I did like this in Node.js, given Firebase reference ref:

var url = require('url'); // standard Node.js 'url' module.
var location = url.parse(ref.toString()).pathname;

Is this the correct way to do or there exist a more reliable way?

PS. I saw ref.path.o is the array containing the strings that can construct the path but I think it's not on the public API and may subject to change?

Answer 1

If you think of this outside of the context of Firebase, it becomes "How do I get just the path from a URL?" Searching for that is bound to give good results. They'll likely be similar to what you came up with now.

Another approach might be to depend on Firebase 2.x SDK's root() method, which later became the root property in Firebase 3 SDK onwards to determine the base URL.

// For Firebase 2.x SDK
var location = ref.toString().substring(ref.root().toString().length);

// For Firebase 3 SDK and later
var location = ref.toString().substring(ref.root.toString().length);