Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

How to do it...

The urllib.parse module has multiple tools to parse URLs. The most commonly used solution is to rely on urllib.parse.urlparse, which can handle the most widespread kinds of URLs:

import urllib.parse

def parse_url(url):
    """Parses an URL of the most widespread format.

    This takes for granted there is a single set of parameters
    for the whole path.
    """
    parts = urllib.parse.urlparse(url)
    parsed = vars(parts)
    parsed['query'] = urllib.parse.parse_qs(parts.query)
    return parsed

The preceding code snippet can be called on the command line, as follows:

>>> url = 'http://user:[e-mail]:80/path/subpath?arg1=val1&arg2=val2#fragment' >>> result = parse_url(url) >>> print(result) OrderedDict([('scheme', 'http'), ('netloc', 'user:[e-mail]:80'), ...