Python - Split url into its components

Question

I have a huge list of urls that are all like this:

http://www.example.com/site/section1/VAR1/VAR2

Where VAR1 and VAR2 are the dynamic elements of the url. What I want to do is to extract from this url string only the VAR1. I've tried to use urlparse but the output look like this:

ParseResult(scheme='http', netloc='www.example.com', path='/site/section1/VAR1/VAR2', params='', query='', fragment='')

Answer 1

You can remember this in general. Different sections of the url can be obtained using urlparse. Here you can obtain the path by urlparse(url).path and then obtain the desired variable by split() function

>>> from urlparse import urlparse
>>> url = 'http://www.example.com/site/section1/VAR1/VAR2' 
>>> urlparse(url)
ParseResult(scheme='http', netloc='www.example.com', path='/site/section1/VAR1/VAR2', params='', query='', fragment='')
>>> urlparse(url).path
'/site/section1/VAR1/VAR2'
>>> urlparse(url).path.split('/')[-2]
'VAR1'