Book Image

Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

By : Alessandro Molina
Book Image

Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

By: Alessandro Molina

Overview of this book

The Python 3 Standard Library is a vast array of modules that you can use for developing various kinds of applications. It contains an exhaustive list of libraries, and this book will help you choose the best one to address specific programming problems in Python. The Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook begins with recipes on containers and data structures and guides you in performing effective text management in Python. You will find Python recipes for command-line operations, networking, filesystems and directories, and concurrent execution. You will learn about Python security essentials in Python and get to grips with various development tools for debugging, benchmarking, inspection, error reporting, and tracing. The book includes recipes to help you create graphical user interfaces for your application. You will learn to work with multimedia components and perform mathematical operations on date and time. The recipes will also show you how to deploy different searching and sorting algorithms on your data. By the end of the book, you will have acquired the skills needed to write clean code in Python and develop applications that meet your needs.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Parsing URLs


When working with web-based software, it's frequently necessary to understand links, protocols, and paths.

You might be tempted to rely on regular expressions or strings splitting to parse URLs, but if you account for all the oddities a URL might include (things such as credentials or particular protocols), it might not be as easy as you expect.

Python provides utilities in the urllib and cgi modules that make life easier when you want to account for all the possible different formats a URL can have.

Relying on them can make life easier and your software more robust.

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...