extract domain name from url
Sometimes I need to find domain name from url in my program for various purposes (most of the time in my crawlers). So far I used the following function that takes an url and returns the domain name: def find_domain(url): pos = url[7:].find('/') if pos == -1: pos = url[7:].find('?') if pos == -1: return url[7:] url = url[7:(7+pos)] return url But today I found a module named urlparse. So my function now looks like this: def find_domain2(url): return urlparse(url)[1] The new one is much better I think. Check urlparse for details.