Split a URL into its components in Python

Question

I have a huge list of URLs that are all like this:

http://www.example.com/site/section1/VAR1/VAR2

Where VAR1 and VAR2 are the dynamic elements of the URL. I want to extract only the VAR1 from this URL string. I've tried to use urlparse, but the output look like this:

ParseResult(scheme='http', netloc='www.example.com', path='/site/section1/VAR1/VAR2', params='', query='', fragment='')

The canonical question is *[How can I split a URL string up into separate parts in Python?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/449775/)* (2009). — Peter Mortensen, Nov 28 '22 at 02:36

score 21 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 01 '15 at 19:40

21

Alternatively, you can apply the split() method:

>>> url = "http://www.example.com/site/section1/VAR1/VAR2"
>>> url.split("/")[-2:]
['VAR1', 'VAR2']

answered Jul 01 '15 at 19:40

alecxe

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rsplit is more efficient than split because it saves splits using maxsplit argument. – pythondetective Jul 01 '15 at 20:14

score 15 · Answer 2 · edited Dec 01 '22 at 23:49

15

You can remember this in general. Different sections of the URL can be obtained using urlparse. Here you can obtain the path by urlparse(url).path and then obtain the desired variable by split() function

>>> from urlparse import urlparse
>>> url = 'http://www.example.com/site/section1/VAR1/VAR2'
>>> urlparse(url)
ParseResult(scheme='http', netloc='www.example.com', path='/site/section1/VAR1/VAR2', params='', query='', fragment='')
>>> urlparse(url).path
'/site/section1/VAR1/VAR2'
>>> urlparse(url).path.split('/')[-2]
'VAR1'

edited Dec 01 '22 at 23:49

Peter Mortensen

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answered Jul 01 '15 at 19:41

Naman Sogani

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for python 3 it's `from urllib.parse import urlparse` – mislavcimpersak Jul 22 '19 at 11:49

score 4 · Answer 3 · edited Dec 01 '22 at 23:50

4

Check this one. It is quite efficient, because it starts from the end of the string. With the maxsplit option, we can stop the number of splits.

Finally, you can use indexing to get the last two parts of the URL:

>>> url.rsplit('/',2)[1:]
['VAR1', 'VAR2']

edited Dec 01 '22 at 23:50

Peter Mortensen

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answered Jul 01 '15 at 20:01

pythondetective

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Jul 01 '15 at 19:42

0

I would simply try

url = 'http://www.example.com/site/section1/VAR1/VAR2'
var1 = url.split('/')[-2]

answered Jul 01 '15 at 19:42

qmorgan

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Split a URL into its components in Python

4 Answers4