iRule Help - Capture URI, Modify, and Redirect

You're probably on the right track with the scan command. TCL scan takes three primary arguments: the string to evaluate, format specifier, and the arbitrary variables to "dump" scanned string values.

So for example, let's take your second URI:

set tmp1 "/A/B/find-a-thing1/thing1detail/actualthing1/garbage"

To scan out each of the URI components into separate variables, it might look something like this:

scan $tmp1 {/%[^/]/%[^/]/%[^/]/%[^/]/%[^/]/%[^/]} a b c d e f

The "%[^/]" specifier says to take all of the characters that are not a forward slash "/" and assign those to one of the variables at the end. With 6 URI components, this dumps each into a separate variable (a-f).