Question

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Python, opposite function urllib.urlencode

I have a url string which is already formatted with key=value pairs and &’s in between, as created by urllib’s urlencode function. Is there a standard Python library utility to reverse this process? That is:

Given a string representing a url, return a string containing the base url and a dictionary containing the key-value pairs in the url.

I can cook up a simple solution on my own that does this for reasonable urls, but I imagine weird things can happen with an arbitrary url. So is there a standard library function that does this safely?

Answer 1

The built-in urlparse does what you want:

>>> bits = urlparse.urlparse('http://www.example.com/foo?bar=zoo&a=b')
>>> bits.query
'bar=zoo&a=b'
>>> urlparse.parse_qs(bits.query)
{'a': ['b'], 'bar': ['zoo']}