How to remove scheme from url in Python?

Question

I am working with an application that returns urls, written with Flask. I want the URL displayed to the user to be as clean as possible so I want to remove the http:// from it. I looked and found the urlparse library, but couldn't find any examples of how to do this.

What would be the best way to go about it, and if urlparse is overkill is there a simpler way? Would simply removing the "http://" substring from the URL just using the regular string parsing tools be bad practice or cause problems?

Answer 1

I don't think urlparse offers a single method or function for this. This is how I'd do it:

from urlparse import urlparse

url = 'HtTp://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/python?page=2'

def strip_scheme(url):
    parsed = urlparse(url)
    scheme = "%s://" % parsed.scheme
    return parsed.geturl().replace(scheme, '', 1)

print strip_scheme(url)

Output:

stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/python?page=2

If you'd use (only) simple string parsing, you'd have to deal with http[s], and possibly other schemes yourself. Also, this handles weird casing of the scheme.