How to get host name from URL using Python

If you're using Python to do things like web scraping, there will be the time that you want to process a full URL and get just some of the specifics. It could include things like the protocol (http or https), domain name, subdomain, or just the request path.

Python has urllib module to do all things URL. You can dissect and process a URL using urlparse function within the urllib module. It could split the URL to scheme (http or https), netloc(subdomain, domain and TLD) and path.

1. Launch your preferred Python shell.

   $ ipython3
   Python 3.8.2 (default, Apr 27 2020, 15:53:34)
   Type 'copyright', 'credits' or 'license' for more information
   IPython 7.13.0 -- An enhanced Interactive Python. Type '?' for help.

2. Import urllib.parse module.

   In [1]: import urllib.parse

3. Parse URL using urlparse function from urllib.parse module.

   In [2]: parsed_url = urllib.parse.urlparse('https://www.example.com/page.html')

4. Print out parsed URL output.

   In [3]: print(parsed_url)
   ParseResult(scheme='https', netloc='www.example.com', path='/page.html', params=//, query=//, fragment=//)

5. Select required output and process accordingly.

   In [4]: print(parsed_url.netloc)
   www.example.com

6. Create a Python script that accepts a URL as parameter and outputs corresponding parsed URL.

   get-host-name-from-url.py

   #!/usr/bin/env python3
    
   import urllib.parse
   import sys
    
   url = sys.argv[1]
   parsed_url = urllib.parse.urlparse(url)
    
   print(parsed_url)
   print("Host name: ", parsed_url.netloc)

7. Run the script from the command with URL as parameter.

   $ python3 get-host-name-from-url.py https://www.example.com/page.html
   ParseResult(scheme='https', netloc='www.example.com', path='/page.html', params=//, query=//, fragment=//)
   Host name:  www.example.com