Question

okay i found this regex from Stack overflow, which can isolate the URL and ID, but when ever i tried to use it in app engine (py) an error popup saying “nothing to repeat, i know theres a bug in Python regarding this regex repeating, can anyone fix this? tx

  File "C:\Program Files\Python27\lib\re.py", line 244, in _compile
    raise error, v # invalid expression
error: nothing to repeat

sample code

#   patt = '(?:http:\/\/)?(?:www.)?facebook.com\/(?:(?:\w)*#!\/)?(?:pages\/)?(?:[?\w\-]*\/)?(?:profile.php\?id=(?=\d.*))?([\w\-]*)?'
#   tst = self.request.get("form_fbURL")
#   m=re.match(patt,tst)

im not a good python programmer anyway 🙂

Answer 1

There is a urlparse module to parse url.
The urlparse module is renamed to urllib.parse in Python 3.0.

$ python
>>> from urlparse import urlparse
>>> urlparse('http://www.facebook.com/hello/world.php?id=789')
ParseResult(scheme='http', netloc='www.facebook.com', path='/hello/world.php', params='', query='id=789', fragment='')