How can I check if a URL is absolute using Python?

Question

What is the preferred solution for checking if an URL is relative or absolute?

Answer 1

Python 2

You can use the urlparse module to parse an URL and then you can check if it's relative or absolute by checking whether it has the host name set.

>>> import urlparse >>> def is_absolute(url): ...     return bool(urlparse.urlparse(url).netloc) ...  >>> is_absolute('http://www.example.com/some/path') True >>> is_absolute('//www.example.com/some/path') True >>> is_absolute('/some/path') False 

Python 3

urlparse has been moved to urllib.parse, so use the following:

from urllib.parse import urlparse  def is_absolute(url):     return bool(urlparse(url).netloc) 

Answer 2

If you want to know if an URL is absolute or relative in order to join it with a base URL, I usually do urllib.parse.urljoin anyway:

>>> from urllib.parse import urljoin >>> urljoin('http://example.com/', 'http://example.com/picture.png') 'http://example.com/picture.png' >>> urljoin('http://example1.com/', '/picture.png') 'http://example1.com/picture.png' >>>