How to split a web address

Question

So I'm using python to do some parsing of web pages and I want to split the full web address into two parts. Say I have the address http://www.stackoverflow.com/questions/ask. I would need the protocol and domain (e.g. http://www.stackoverflow.com) and the path (e.g. /questions/ask). I figured this might be solved by some regex, however I'm not so handy with that. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Dan is right: urlparse is your friend:

>>> from urlparse import urlparse
>>>
>>> parts = urlparse("http://www.stackoverflow.com/questions/ask")
>>> parts.scheme + "://" + parts.netloc
'http://www.stackoverflow.com'
>>> parts.path
'/questions/ask'

Note: In Python 3 it's from urllib.parse import urlparse

Answer 2

Use the Python urlparse module:

https://docs.python.org/library/urlparse.html

For a well-defined and well-traveled problem like this, don't bother with writing your own code, let alone your own regular expressions. They cause too much trouble ;-).

Answer 3

import re
url = "http://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask"
protocol, domain = re.match(r"(http://[^/]*)(.*)", url).groups()