Question

During a unittest I would like to compare a generated URL with a static one defined in the test. For this comparison it would be good to have a TestCase.assertURLEqual or similar which would let you compare two URLs in string format and result in True if all query and fragment components were present and equal but not necessarily in order.

Before I go implement this myself, is this feature around already?

Answer 1

I don’t know if there is something built-in, but you could simply use urlparse and check yourself for the query parameters since order is taken into account by default.

>>> import urlparse
>>> url1 = 'http://google.com/?a=1&b=2'
>>> url2 = 'http://google.com/?b=2&a=1'
>>> # parse url ignoring query params order
... def parse_url(url):
...   u = urlparse.urlparse(url)
...   q = u.query
...   u = urlparse.urlparse(u.geturl().replace(q, ''))
...   return (u, urlparse.parse_qs(q))
... 
>>> parse_url(url1)
(ParseResult(scheme='http', netloc='google.com', path='/', params='', query='', fragment=''), {'a': ['1'], 'b': ['2']})
>>> def assert_url_equals(url1, url2):
...   return parse_url(url1) == parse_url(url1)
...
>>> assert_url_equals(url1, url2)
True