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Determines whether a given URL is absolute (contains a network location/domain) or relative.

Purpose

This function checks if a URL string is absolute by parsing it and verifying the presence of a network location (netloc) component. An absolute URL includes a scheme and domain (e.g., 'https://example.com/path'), while a relative URL does not (e.g., '/path/to/resource'). This is commonly used in web scraping, URL validation, and link processing to distinguish between internal and external links or to determine if a URL needs to be joined with a base URL.

Source Code

def is_absolute_url(url):
    return bool(urlparse(url).netloc)

Parameters

Parameter Details

url: A string representing the URL to check. Can be any valid URL format including absolute URLs (e.g., 'https://example.com'), relative URLs (e.g., '/path'), or malformed URLs. The function expects a string input; passing None or non-string types may cause errors.

Return Value

Returns a boolean value: True if the URL is absolute (contains a network location component like 'example.com'), False if the URL is relative (no network location). The function uses bool() to convert the netloc attribute to a boolean, so any non-empty netloc string returns True, and an empty string returns False.

Required Imports

from urllib.parse import urlparse

Conditional/Optional Imports

These imports are only needed under specific conditions:

from urlparse import urlparse

Usage Example

from urllib.parse import urlparse

def is_absolute_url(url):
    return bool(urlparse(url).netloc)

# Example usage
print(is_absolute_url('https://www.example.com/path'))  # True
print(is_absolute_url('http://example.com'))  # True
print(is_absolute_url('/relative/path'))  # False
print(is_absolute_url('path/to/file'))  # False
print(is_absolute_url('//example.com/path'))  # True (protocol-relative URL)
print(is_absolute_url(''))  # False

Best Practices

• This function only checks for the presence of a network location (netloc), not whether the URL is valid or reachable
• Protocol-relative URLs (starting with '//') are considered absolute by this function
• The function does not validate URL syntax or check if the scheme is present; it only checks for netloc
• For Python 2/3 compatibility, ensure the correct urlparse import is used based on the Python version
• Consider adding input validation to handle None or non-string inputs if needed in production code
• This function treats URLs with only a scheme (e.g., 'http://') as relative since netloc would be empty

Tags

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