Question

What is the preferred solution for checking if an URL is relative or absolute?

Answer 1

Python 2

You can use the urlparse module to parse an URL and then you can check if it’s relative or absolute by checking whether it has the host name set.

>>> import urlparse
>>> def is_absolute(url):
...     return bool(urlparse.urlparse(url).netloc)
... 
>>> is_absolute('http://www.example.com/some/path')
True
>>> is_absolute('//www.example.com/some/path')
True
>>> is_absolute('/some/path')
False

Python 3

urlparse has been moved to urllib.parse, so use the following:

from urllib.parse import urlparse

def is_absolute(url):
    return bool(urlparse(url).netloc)