URLExtract

URLExtract is python class for collecting (extracting) URLs from given text based on locating TLD.

How does it work

It tries to find any occurrence of TLD in given text. If TLD is found it starts from that position to expand boundaries to both sides searching for "stop character" (usually whitespace, comma, single or double quote).

A dns check option is available to also reject invalid domain names.

NOTE: List of TLDs is downloaded from iana.org to keep you up to date with new TLDs.

Installation

Package is available on PyPI - you can install it via pip.

pip install urlextract

Documentation

Online documentation is published at http://urlextract.readthedocs.io/

Requirements

IDNA for converting links to IDNA format
uritools for domain name validation
platformdirs for determining user's cache directory

dnspython to cache DNS results

pip install idna
pip install uritools
pip install platformdirs
pip install dnspython

Or you can install the requirements with requirements.txt:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Run tox

Install tox:

pip install tox

Then run it:

tox

Example

You can look at command line program at the end of urlextract.py. But everything you need to know is this:

from urlextract import URLExtract

extractor = URLExtract()
urls = extractor.find_urls("Text with URLs. Let's have URL janlipovsky.cz as an example.")
print(urls) # prints: ['janlipovsky.cz']

Or you can get generator over URLs in text by:

from urlextract import URLExtract

extractor = URLExtract()
example_text = "Text with URLs. Let's have URL janlipovsky.cz as an example."

for url in extractor.gen_urls(example_text):
    print(url) # prints: ['janlipovsky.cz']

Or if you want to just check if there is at least one URL you can do:

from urlextract import URLExtract

extractor = URLExtract()
example_text = "Text with URLs. Let's have URL janlipovsky.cz as an example."

if extractor.has_urls(example_text):
    print("Given text contains some URL")

If you want to have up to date list of TLDs you can use update():

from urlextract import URLExtract

extractor = URLExtract()
extractor.update()

or update_when_older() method:

from urlextract import URLExtract

extractor = URLExtract()
extractor.update_when_older(7) # updates when list is older that 7 days

Known issues

Since TLD can be not only shortcut but also some meaningful word we might see "false matches" when we are searching for URL in some HTML pages. The false match can occur for example in css or JS when you are referring to HTML item using its classes.

Example HTML code:

<p class="bold name">Jan</p>
<style>
  p.bold.name {
    font-weight: bold;
  }
</style>

If this HTML snippet is on the input of urlextract.find_urls() it will return p.bold.name as an URL. Behavior of urlextract is correct, because .name is valid TLD and urlextract just see that there is bold.name valid domain name and p is valid sub-domain.