Opposite of url_for()?

Rails
1

Hi,

I have a string in a controller that represents a url for my website.
For example the string might be

/cont/act/id

and I want to break this up using the routes defined in my
config/routes.rb file so that I get a hash like

{:controller => ‘cont’, :act => ‘act’, :id=>‘id’}

How can I access all of the information stored in config/routes.rb so
I can deconstruct a url string? I think I want the opposite of
url_for()

Thanks,
Peter