imurl

imurl is an immutable URL library, written in modern Python.

imurl is inspired by both purl and Python's pathlib and datetime modules. It aims to provide a simple, immutable data structure to represent URL structures, with support for a wide range of URL/URI schemes.

Examples

Here are some quick examples for imurl. There are more in the documentation.

URLs can be created from URL strings, and have the attributes you'd expect:

>>> from imurl import URL
>>> u = URL("https://example.com")
>>> u
imurl.URL('https://example.com')
>>> u.host
'example.com'
>>> u.scheme
'https'

URLs are immutable, but components can be replaced similarly to datetime/pathlib objects:

>>> u.replace(path="/some/path")
imurl.URL('https://example.com/some/path')
>>> u.path  # This is still `None` - we haven't modified `u`.
>>> u.replace(path="/some/path").path_as_posix
PurePosixPath('/some/path')

URLs can also be built from components, and query/path parameters can be set/get/deleted:

>>> u = URL(scheme="https", host="google.com", path="/search")
imurl.URL('https://google.com/search')
>>> u2 = u.set_query("q", "a+search+term")
>>> u2
imurl.URL('https://google.com/search?q=a+search+term')
>>> u2.delete_query("q")
imurl.URL('https://google.com/search')

How does imurl differ from the alternatives?

imurl aims to be a clean, pythonic API around URL manipulation. It should be easier than using urllib.parse.urlparse, and just as flexible as anything you'd roll yourself.

imurl is written with modern Python, with all the advantages that brings: static analysis tools (mypy, pylint) are used to increase code quality, and the project's style is very consistent (black). These tools should help to reduce bugs once imurl is out of the alpha stage.

Alternatives:

• urllib.parse.urlparse is the standard library approach to URL parsing. Flexible, but manual. There's very little in the way of convenience.
• furl is a mutable URL parsing library. Furl is flexible and easily understood, but unfortunately mutable.
• purl is the original immutable URL parsing library for Python. purl did a lot to inspire imurl: URLs are immutable, the jQuery-like approach (though nonstandard) feels intuitive, and it's relatively stable. purl doesn't handle file-like URLs particularly well (those without a host) and unfortunately is not currently typed. purl is recommended whilst imurl is in alpha.

Installation

imurl can be installed with pip, and has been tested on Python 3.8. imurl is still alpha software, and should be considered unstable:

pip install imurl