urllib.parse — Parse URLs into components¶Source code: Lib/urllib/parse.py
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. 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, ws, wss.
The urllib.parse module defines functions that fall into two broad
categories: URL parsing and URL quoting. These are covered in detail in
the following sections.
The URL parsing functions focus on splitting a URL string into its components, or on combining URL components into a URL string.
urllib.parse.urlparse(urlstring, scheme='', allow_fragments=True)¶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 urllib.parse 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'
Following the syntax specifications in RFC 1808, urlparse recognizes a netloc only if it is properly introduced by ‘//’. Otherwise the input is presumed to be a relative URL and thus to start with a path component.
>>> from urllib.parse import urlparse
>>> urlparse('//www.cwi.nl:80/%7Eguido/Python.html')
ParseResult(scheme='', netloc='www.cwi.nl:80', path='/%7Eguido/Python.html',
params='', query='', fragment='')
>>> urlparse('www.cwi.nl/%7Eguido/Python.html')
ParseResult(scheme='', netloc='', path='www.cwi.nl/%7Eguido/Python.html',
params='', query='', fragment='')
>>> urlparse('help/Python.html')
ParseResult(scheme='', netloc='', path='help/Python.html', params='',
query='', fragment='')
The scheme argument gives the default addressing scheme, to be
used only if the URL does not specify one. It should be the same type
(text or bytes) as urlstring, except that the default value '' is
always allowed, and is automatically converted to b'' if appropriate.
If the allow_fragments argument is false, fragment identifiers are not
recognized. Instead, they are parsed as part of the path, parameters
or query component, and fragment is set to the empty string in
the return value.
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 | scheme parameter |
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 |
Reading the port attribute will raise a ValueError if
an invalid port is specified in the URL. See section
Structured Parse Results for more information on the result object.
Changed in version 3.2: Added IPv6 URL parsing capabilities.
Changed in version 3.3: The fragment is now parsed for all URL schemes (unless allow_fragment is false), in accordance with RFC 3986. Previously, a whitelist of schemes that support fragments existed.
Changed in version 3.6: Out-of-range port numbers now raise ValueError, instead of
returning None.
urllib.parse.parse_qs(qs, keep_blank_values=False, strict_parsing=False, encoding='utf-8', errors='replace')¶Parse a query string given as a string argument (data of type application/x-www-form-urlencoded). Data are returned as a dictionary. The dictionary keys are the unique query variable names and the values are lists of values for each name.
The optional argument keep_blank_values is a flag indicating whether blank values in percent-encoded queries should be treated as blank strings. A true value indicates that blanks should be retained as blank strings. The default false value indicates that blank values are to be ignored and treated as if they were not included.
The optional argument strict_parsing is a flag indicating what to do with
parsing errors. If false (the default), errors are silently ignored. If true,
errors raise a ValueError exception.
The optional encoding and errors parameters specify how to decode
percent-encoded sequences into Unicode characters, as accepted by the
bytes.decode() method.
Use the urllib.parse.urlencode() function (with the doseq
parameter set to True) to convert such dictionaries into query
strings.
Changed in version 3.2: Add encoding and errors parameters.
urllib.parse.parse_qsl(qs, keep_blank_values=False, strict_parsing=False, encoding='utf-8', errors='replace')¶Parse a query string given as a string argument (data of type application/x-www-form-urlencoded). Data are returned as a list of name, value pairs.
The optional argument keep_blank_values is a flag indicating whether blank values in percent-encoded queries should be treated as blank strings. A true value indicates that blanks should be retained as blank strings. The default false value indicates that blank values are to be ignored and treated as if they were not included.
The optional argument strict_parsing is a flag indicating what to do with
parsing errors. If false (the default), errors are silently ignored. If true,
errors raise a ValueError exception.
The optional encoding and errors parameters specify how to decode
percent-encoded sequences into Unicode characters, as accepted by the
bytes.decode() method.
Use the urllib.parse.urlencode() function to convert such lists of pairs into
query strings.
Changed in version 3.2: Add encoding and errors parameters.
urllib.parse.urlunparse(parts)¶Construct a URL from a tuple as returned by urlparse(). The parts
argument can be any six-item iterable. This may result in a slightly
different, but equivalent URL, if the URL that was parsed originally had
unnecessary delimiters (for example, a ? with an empty query; the RFC
states that these are equivalent).
urllib.parse.urlsplit(urlstring, scheme='', allow_fragments=True)¶This is similar to urlparse(), but does not split the params from the URL.
This should generally be used instead of urlparse() if the more recent URL
syntax allowing parameters to be applied to each segment of the path portion
of the URL (see RFC 2396) is wanted. A separate function is needed to
separate the path segments and parameters. This function returns a 5-tuple:
(addressing scheme, network location, path, query, fragment identifier).
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 | scheme parameter |
netloc |
1 | Network location part | empty string |
path |
2 | Hierarchical path | empty string |
query |
3 | Query component | empty string |
fragment |
4 | 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 |
Reading the port attribute will raise a ValueError if
an invalid port is specified in the URL. See section
Structured Parse Results for more information on the result object.
Changed in version 3.6: Out-of-range port numbers now raise ValueError, instead of
returning None.
urllib.parse.urlunsplit(parts)¶Combine the elements of a tuple as returned by urlsplit() into a
complete URL as a string. The parts argument can be any five-item
iterable. This may result in a slightly different, but equivalent URL, if the
URL that was parsed originally had unnecessary delimiters (for example, a ?
with an empty query; the RFC states that these are equivalent).
urllib.parse.urljoin(base, url, allow_fragments=True)¶Construct a full (“absolute”) URL by combining a “base URL” (base) with another URL (url). Informally, this uses components of the base URL, in particular the addressing scheme, the network location and (part of) the path, to provide missing components in the relative URL. For example:
>>> from urllib.parse import urljoin
>>> urljoin('http://www.cwi.nl/%7Eguido/Python.html', 'FAQ.html')
'http://www.cwi.nl/%7Eguido/FAQ.html'
The allow_fragments argument has the same meaning and default as for
urlparse().
Note
If url is an absolute URL (that is, starting with // or scheme://),
the url‘s host name and/or scheme will be present in the result. For example:
>>> urljoin('http://www.cwi.nl/%7Eguido/Python.html',
... '//www.python.org/%7Eguido')
'http://www.python.org/%7Eguido'
If you do not want that behavior, preprocess the url with urlsplit() and
urlunsplit(), removing possible scheme and netloc parts.
Changed in version 3.5: Behaviour updated to match the semantics defined in RFC 3986.
urllib.parse.urldefrag(url)¶If url contains a fragment identifier, return a modified version of url with no fragment identifier, and the fragment identifier as a separate string. If there is no fragment identifier in url, return url unmodified and an empty string.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
url |
0 | URL with no fragment | empty string |
fragment |
1 | Fragment identifier | empty string |
See section Structured Parse Results for more information on the result object.
Changed in version 3.2: Result is a structured object rather than a simple 2-tuple.
The URL parsing functions were originally designed to operate on character
strings only. In practice, it is useful to be able to manipulate properly
quoted and encoded URLs as sequences of ASCII bytes. Accordingly, the
URL parsing functions in this module all operate on bytes and
bytearray objects in addition to str objects.
If str data is passed in, the result will also contain only
str data. If bytes or bytearray data is
passed in, the result will contain only bytes data.
Attempting to mix str data with bytes or
bytearray in a single function call will result in a
TypeError being raised, while attempting to pass in non-ASCII
byte values will trigger UnicodeDecodeError.
To support easier conversion of result objects between str and
bytes, all return values from URL parsing functions provide
either an encode() method (when the result contains str
data) or a decode() method (when the result contains bytes
data). The signatures of these methods match those of the corresponding
str and bytes methods (except that the default encoding
is 'ascii' rather than 'utf-8'). Each produces a value of a
corresponding type that contains either bytes data (for
encode() methods) or str data (for
decode() methods).
Applications that need to operate on potentially improperly quoted URLs that may contain non-ASCII data will need to do their own decoding from bytes to characters before invoking the URL parsing methods.
The behaviour described in this section applies only to the URL parsing functions. The URL quoting functions use their own rules when producing or consuming byte sequences as detailed in the documentation of the individual URL quoting functions.
Changed in version 3.2: URL parsing functions now accept ASCII encoded byte sequences
The result objects from the urlparse(), urlsplit() and
urldefrag() functions are subclasses of the tuple type.
These subclasses add the attributes listed in the documentation for
those functions, the encoding and decoding support described in the
previous section, as well as an additional method:
urllib.parse.SplitResult.geturl()¶Return the re-combined version of the original URL as a string. This may differ from the original URL in that the scheme may be normalized to lower case and empty components may be dropped. Specifically, empty parameters, queries, and fragment identifiers will be removed.
For urldefrag() results, only empty fragment identifiers will be removed.
For urlsplit() and urlparse() results, all noted changes will be
made to the URL returned by this method.
The result of this method remains unchanged if passed back through the original parsing function:
>>> from urllib.parse import urlsplit
>>> url = 'HTTP://www.Python.org/doc/#'
>>> r1 = urlsplit(url)
>>> r1.geturl()
'http://www.Python.org/doc/'
>>> r2 = urlsplit(r1.geturl())
>>> r2.geturl()
'http://www.Python.org/doc/'
The following classes provide the implementations of the structured parse
results when operating on str objects:
urllib.parse.DefragResult(url, fragment)¶Concrete class for urldefrag() results containing str
data. The encode() method returns a DefragResultBytes
instance.
New in version 3.2.
urllib.parse.ParseResult(scheme, netloc, path, params, query, fragment)¶Concrete class for urlparse() results containing str
data. The encode() method returns a ParseResultBytes
instance.
urllib.parse.SplitResult(scheme, netloc, path, query, fragment)¶Concrete class for urlsplit() results containing str
data. The encode() method returns a SplitResultBytes
instance.
The following classes provide the implementations of the parse results when
operating on bytes or bytearray objects:
urllib.parse.DefragResultBytes(url, fragment)¶Concrete class for urldefrag() results containing bytes
data. The decode() method returns a DefragResult
instance.
New in version 3.2.
urllib.parse.ParseResultBytes(scheme, netloc, path, params, query, fragment)¶Concrete class for urlparse() results containing bytes
data. The decode() method returns a ParseResult
instance.
New in version 3.2.
urllib.parse.SplitResultBytes(scheme, netloc, path, query, fragment)¶Concrete class for urlsplit() results containing bytes
data. The decode() method returns a SplitResult
instance.
New in version 3.2.
The URL quoting functions focus on taking program data and making it safe for use as URL components by quoting special characters and appropriately encoding non-ASCII text. They also support reversing these operations to recreate the original data from the contents of a URL component if that task isn’t already covered by the URL parsing functions above.
urllib.parse.quote(string, safe='/', encoding=None, errors=None)¶Replace special characters in string using the %xx escape. Letters,
digits, and the characters '_.-' are never quoted. By default, this
function is intended for quoting the path section of URL. The optional safe
parameter specifies additional ASCII characters that should not be quoted
— its default value is '/'.
string may be either a str or a bytes.
The optional encoding and errors parameters specify how to deal with
non-ASCII characters, as accepted by the str.encode() method.
encoding defaults to 'utf-8'.
errors defaults to 'strict', meaning unsupported characters raise a
UnicodeEncodeError.
encoding and errors must not be supplied if string is a
bytes, or a TypeError is raised.
Note that quote(string, safe, encoding, errors) is equivalent to
quote_from_bytes(string.encode(encoding, errors), safe).
Example: quote('/El Niño/') yields '/El%20Ni%C3%B1o/'.
urllib.parse.quote_plus(string, safe='', encoding=None, errors=None)¶Like quote(), but also replace spaces by plus signs, as required for
quoting HTML form values when building up a query string to go into a URL.
Plus signs in the original string are escaped unless they are included in
safe. It also does not have safe default to '/'.
Example: quote_plus('/El Niño/') yields '%2FEl+Ni%C3%B1o%2F'.
urllib.parse.quote_from_bytes(bytes, safe='/')¶Like quote(), but accepts a bytes object rather than a
str, and does not perform string-to-bytes encoding.
Example: quote_from_bytes(b'a&\xef') yields
'a%26%EF'.
urllib.parse.unquote(string, encoding='utf-8', errors='replace')¶Replace %xx escapes by their single-character equivalent.
The optional encoding and errors parameters specify how to decode
percent-encoded sequences into Unicode characters, as accepted by the
bytes.decode() method.
string must be a str.
encoding defaults to 'utf-8'.
errors defaults to 'replace', meaning invalid sequences are replaced
by a placeholder character.
Example: unquote('/El%20Ni%C3%B1o/') yields '/El Niño/'.
urllib.parse.unquote_plus(string, encoding='utf-8', errors='replace')¶Like unquote(), but also replace plus signs by spaces, as required for
unquoting HTML form values.
string must be a str.
Example: unquote_plus('/El+Ni%C3%B1o/') yields '/El Niño/'.
urllib.parse.unquote_to_bytes(string)¶Replace %xx escapes by their single-octet equivalent, and return a
bytes object.
string may be either a str or a bytes.
If it is a str, unescaped non-ASCII characters in string
are encoded into UTF-8 bytes.
Example: unquote_to_bytes('a%26%EF') yields b'a&\xef'.
urllib.parse.urlencode(query, doseq=False, safe='', encoding=None, errors=None, quote_via=quote_plus)¶Convert a mapping object or a sequence of two-element tuples, which may
contain str or bytes objects, to a percent-encoded ASCII
text string. If the resultant string is to be used as a data for POST
operation with the urlopen() function, then
it should be encoded to bytes, otherwise it would result in a
TypeError.
The resulting string is a series of key=value pairs separated by '&'
characters, where both key and value are quoted using the quote_via
function. By default, quote_plus() is used to quote the values, which
means spaces are quoted as a '+' character and ‘/’ characters are
encoded as %2F, which follows the standard for GET requests
(application/x-www-form-urlencoded). An alternate function that can be
passed as quote_via is quote(), which will encode spaces as %20
and not encode ‘/’ characters. For maximum control of what is quoted, use
quote and specify a value for safe.
When a sequence of two-element tuples is used as the query
argument, the first element of each tuple is a key and the second is a
value. The value element in itself can be a sequence and in that case, if
the optional parameter doseq is evaluates to True, individual
key=value pairs separated by '&' are generated for each element of
the value sequence for the key. The order of parameters in the encoded
string will match the order of parameter tuples in the sequence.
The safe, encoding, and errors parameters are passed down to
quote_via (the encoding and errors parameters are only passed
when a query element is a str).
To reverse this encoding process, parse_qs() and parse_qsl() are
provided in this module to parse query strings into Python data structures.
Refer to urllib examples to find out how urlencode method can be used for generating query string for a URL or data for POST.
Changed in version 3.2: Query parameter supports bytes and string objects.
New in version 3.5: quote_via parameter.
See also