20.16. urlparse — Parse URLs into components

Note

The urlparse module is renamed to urllib.parse in Python 3.0. The 2to3 tool will automatically adapt imports when converting your sources to 3.0.

This module defines a standard interface to break Uniform Resource Locator (URL) strings up in components (addressing scheme, network location, path etc.), to combine the components back into a URL string, and to convert a “relative URL” to an absolute URL given a “base URL.”

The module has been designed to match the Internet RFC on Relative Uniform Resource Locators (and discovered a bug in an earlier draft!). It supports the following URL schemes: file, ftp, gopher, hdl, http, https, imap, mailto, mms, news, nntp, prospero, rsync, rtsp, rtspu, sftp, shttp, sip, sips, snews, svn, svn+ssh, telnet, wais.

New in version 2.5:

New in version 2.5: Support for the sftp and sips schemes.

The urlparse module defines the following functions:

urlparse.urlparse(urlstring[, scheme[, allow_fragments]])

Parse a URL into six components, returning a 6-tuple. This corresponds to the general structure of a URL: scheme://netloc/path;parameters?query#fragment. Each tuple item is a string, possibly empty. The components are not broken up in smaller parts (for example, the network location is a single string), and % escapes are not expanded. The delimiters as shown above are not part of the result, except for a leading slash in the path component, which is retained if present. For example:

>>> from urlparse import urlparse
>>> o = urlparse('http://www.cwi.nl:80/%7Eguido/Python.html')
>>> o   
ParseResult(scheme='http', netloc='www.cwi.nl:80', path='/%7Eguido/Python.html',
            params='', query='', fragment='')
>>> o.scheme
'http'
>>> o.port
80
>>> o.geturl()
'http://www.cwi.nl:80/%7Eguido/Python.html'

If the scheme argument is specified, it gives the default addressing scheme, to be used only if the URL does not specify one. The default value for this argument is the empty string.

If the allow_fragments argument is false, fragment identifiers are not allowed, even if the URL’s addressing scheme normally does support them. The default value for this argument is True.

The return value is actually an instance of a subclass of tuple. This class has the following additional read-only convenience attributes:

Attribute	Index	Value	Value if not present
scheme	0	URL scheme specifier	empty string
netloc	1	Network location part	empty string
path	2	Hierarchical path	empty string
params	3	Parameters for last path element	empty string
query	4	Query component	empty string
fragment	5	Fragment identifier	empty string
username		User name	None
password		Password	None
hostname		Host name (lower case)	None
port		Port number as integer, if present	None

See section Results of urlparse() and urlsplit() for more information on the result object.

Changed in version 2.5:

Changed in version 2.5: Added attributes to return value.