Remove Part of String Before the Last Forward Slash

Question

The program I am currently working on retrieves URLs from a website and puts them into a list. What I want to get is the last section of the URL.

So, if the first element in my list of URLs is "https://docs.python.org/3.4/tutorial/interpreter.html" I would want to remove everything before "interpreter.html".

Is there a function, library, or regex I could use to make this happen? I've looked at other Stack Overflow posts but the solutions don't seem to work.

These are two of my several attempts:

for link in link_list:
   file_names.append(link.replace('/[^/]*$',''))
print(file_names)

&

for link in link_list:
   file_names.append(link.rpartition('//')[-1])
print(file_names)

Answer 1

Have a look at str.rsplit.

>>> s = 'https://docs.python.org/3.4/tutorial/interpreter.html'
>>> s.rsplit('/',1)
['https://docs.python.org/3.4/tutorial', 'interpreter.html']
>>> s.rsplit('/',1)[1]
'interpreter.html'

And to use RegEx

>>> re.search(r'(.*)/(.*)',s).group(2)
'interpreter.html'

Then match the 2nd group which lies between the last / and the end of String. This is a greedy usage of the greedy technique in RegEx.

Debuggex Demo

Small Note - The problem with link.rpartition('//')[-1] in your code is that you are trying to match // and not /. So remove the extra / as in link.rpartition('/')[-1].

Answer 2

That doesn't need regex.

import os

for link in link_list:
    file_names.append(os.path.basename(link))