I am searching for a library function to normalize a URL in Python, that is to remove "./" or "../" parts in the path, or add a default port or escape special characters and so on. The result should be a string that is unique for two URLs pointing to the same web page. For example http://google.com
and http://google.com:80/a/../
shall return the same result.
I would prefer Python 3 and already looked through the urllib
module. It offers functions to split URLs but nothing to canonicalize them. Java has the URI.normalize()
function that does a similar thing (though it does not consider the default port 80 equal to no given port), but is there something like this is python?
How about this:
In [1]: from urllib.parse import urljoin
In [2]: urljoin('http://example.com/a/b/c/../', '.')
Out[2]: 'http://example.com/a/b/'
Inspired by answers to this question. It doesn't normalize ports, but it should be simple to whip up a function that does.
This is what I use and it's worked so far. You can get urlnorm from pip.
Notice that I sort the query parameters. I've found this to be essential.
from urlparse import urlsplit, urlunsplit, parse_qsl
from urllib import urlencode
import urlnorm
def canonizeurl(url):
split = urlsplit(urlnorm.norm(url))
path = split[2].split(' ')[0]
while path.startswith('/..'):
path = path[3:]
while path.endswith('%20'):
path = path[:-3]
qs = urlencode(sorted(parse_qsl(split.query)))
return urlunsplit((split.scheme, split.netloc, path, qs, ''))
The urltools module normalizes multiple slashes, .
and ..
components without messing up the double slash in http://
.
Once you do pip install urltools
the usage is as follows:
print urltools.normalize('http://domain.com:80/a////b/../c')
>>> 'http://domain.com/a/c'
Following the good start, I composed a method that fits most of the cases commonly found in the web.
def urlnorm(base, link=''):
'''Normalizes an URL or a link relative to a base url. URLs that point to the same resource will return the same string.'''
new = urlparse(urljoin(base, url).lower())
return urlunsplit((
new.scheme,
(new.port == None) and (new.hostname + ":80") or new.netloc,
new.path,
new.query,
''))