Slicing URL with Python

Question

I am working with a huge list of URL\'s. Just a quick question I have trying to slice a part of the URL out, see below:

http://www.domainname.com/page?CONTEN         


        

Answer 1

Parsin URL is never as simple I it seems to be, that's why there are the urlparse and urllib modules.

E.G :

import urllib
url ="http://www.domainname.com/page?CONTENT_ITEM_ID=1234¶m2¶m3"
query = urllib.splitquery(url)
result = "?".join((query[0], query[1].split("&")[0]))
print result
'http://www.domainname.com/page?CONTENT_ITEM_ID=1234'

This is still not 100 % reliable, but much more than splitting it yourself because there are a lot of valid url format that you and me don't know and discover one day in error logs.