How do you extract a url from a string using python?

Question

For example:

string = "This is a link http://www.google.com" 

How could I extract 'http://www.google.com' ?

(Each link will be of the same format i.e 'http://')

Answer 1

There may be few ways to do this but the cleanest would be to use regex

>>> myString = "This is a link http://www.google.com" >>> print re.search("(?P<url>https?://[^\s]+)", myString).group("url") http://www.google.com 

If there can be multiple links you can use something similar to below

>>> myString = "These are the links http://www.google.com  and http://stackoverflow.com/questions/839994/extracting-a-url-in-python" >>> print re.findall(r'(https?://[^\s]+)', myString) ['http://www.google.com', 'http://stackoverflow.com/questions/839994/extracting-a-url-in-python'] >>>