How can I check if a URL is absolute using Python?

Question

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

Answer 1

Can't comment accepted answer, so write this comment as new answer: IMO checking scheme in accepted answer ( bool(urlparse.urlparse(url).scheme) ) is not really good idea because of http://example.com/file.jpg, https://example.com/file.jpg and //example.com/file.jpg are absolute urls but in last case we get scheme = ''

I use this code:

is_absolute = True if '//' in my_url else False

Answer 2

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)

Answer 3

Not sure what you're asking about. Are you just looking to see if it begins with http:// ? IF so, a simple regex will do the trick.

(EDIT: See comment below -- a very good point!!)

Answer 4

If you want to know if an URL is absolute or relative in order to join it with a base URL, I usually do urlparse.urljoin anyway:

>>> from urlparse import urljoin
>>> urljoin('http://example.com/', 'http://example.com/picture.png')
'http://example.com/picture.png'
>>> urljoin('http://example1.com/', '/picture.png')
'http://example1.com/picture.png'
>>>