So lxml has a very hand feature: make_links_absolute:
doc = lxml.html.fromstring(some_html_page)
doc.make_links_absolute(url_for_some_html_page)
and all the links in doc are absolute now. Is there an easy equivalent in BeautifulSoup or do I simply need to pass it through urlparse and normalize it:
soup = BeautifulSoup(some_html_page)
for tag in soup.findAll('a', href=True):
url_data = urlparse(tag['href'])
if url_data[0] == "":
full_url = url_for_some_html_page + test_url
In my answer to What is a simple way to extract the list of URLs on a webpage using python? I covered that incidentally as part of the extraction step; you could easily write a method to do it on the soup and not just extract it.