About Me

PBX I'm Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using open source software, especially Django. In the '90s I did graphic design for newspapers and magazines. Then I wrote technology commentary and reviews for Wired, Salon.com, Chicago Tribune, and lots of little places you've never heard of. Feel free to email me.

Book

I'm co-author of "Python Web Development with Django", an excellent guide to my favorite web framework. Published by Addison-Wesley, it is available from Amazon and your favorite technical bookstore as well.

Colophon

Built using Django, served by Apache and mod_wsgi. The database is SQLite. The operating system is FreeBSD, on a VPS hosted at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet. Vintage topo imagery from the Maptech archive. The markup engine is Markdown.

Pile o'Tags

Stuff I Use

Akismet, bitbucket, del.icio.us, Django, Emacs, FreeBSD, Git, jQuery, LaunchBar, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Postfix, Python, Review Board, S3, SQLite, TextMate, Ubuntu Linux

Spam Report

At least 96060 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

Python question: a better urlparse?

Is there a more sophisticated equivalent of urlparse.urlparse() somewhere that knows enough to break out username and password components? Ideally it would return a dict, with keys like 'scheme' and 'host' and 'user', instead of a tuple. Something like PHP's parse_url().

Monday, December 12th, 2005
php + python
2 comments

• Comment from Paul Jimenez , later that day

I wrote http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-November/058301.html about urlparse being broken not too long ago, though I have yet to present my replacement. What kind of API do you think a better urlparse() should have? Keep in mind a good solution should deal with not only http://user:password@host:port/path?query#fragment, but also tel:1-234-567-8910 and news:newsgroup and news:msgid@newsgroup. I suspect the problem with a dict instead of a tuple is standardization of keys. Or maybe that's fine. I'd be interested in your opinion.

• Comment from Paul , later that day

Now that I've seen that thread, the solution seems pretty well hashed out. That little [`netlocparse()`][1] snippet does a lot of what I was looking for. Seems like Guido's just waiting for somebody to submit a patch. Since the function is called "urlparse" and not "uriparse" I wouldn't let utter completeness stand in the way of a decent fix.

[1]: http://minkirri.apana.org.au/~abo/projects/osVFS/netlocparse.py