How to split a web address [duplicate]

Question

So I'm using python to do some parsing of web pages and I want to split the full web address into two parts. Say I have the address http://www.stackoverflow.com/questions/ask. I would need the protocol and domain (e.g. http://www.stackoverflow.com) and the path (e.g. /questions/ask). I figured this might be solved by some regex, however I'm not so handy with that. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Dan is right: urlparse is your friend:

>>> from urlparse import urlparse
>>>
>>> parts = urlparse("http://www.stackoverflow.com/questions/ask")
>>> parts.scheme + "://" + parts.netloc
'http://www.stackoverflow.com'
>>> parts.path
'/questions/ask'

Note: In Python 3 it's from urllib.parse import urlparse