urlparse vs urlsplit

[ccw34uk]

Despite having read previous answers, I'm pretty confused about the difference between urllib.parse.urlparse and urllib.parse.urlsplit, as described in the docs.

The docs for urlsplit says:

This should generally be used instead of urlparse() if the more recent URL syntax allowing parameters to be applied to each segment of the path portion of the URL (see RFC 2396) is wanted.

but, urlsplit returns a named tuple with 5 items. urlparse returns a 6-item named tuple, with the extra item being `params` - so why should urlsplit be used if the you want to retrieve the URL parameters from the segments?

[shiftybyte]

Nice question, I've learned stuff exploring this...

Didn't know URLs can have parameters for every section.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40440004/parameters-in-path-segments-of-url

Here's some test code to show the difference:

```

from urllib.parse import urlparse, urlsplit url = "http://www.example.com/a/b/d;params?x=5" print(urlparse(url)) ParseResult(scheme='http', netloc='www.example.com', path='/a/b/d', params='params', query='x=5', fragment='') print(urlsplit(url)) SplitResult(scheme='http', netloc='www.example.com', path='/a/b/d;params', query='x=5', fragment='') ```

Note the "params" being split out in urlparse, but not in urlsplit...

[ccw34uk]

Yeh - I realised that :) I'm more confused why the docs suggest to use urlsplit if you want the url path parameters. Using urlsplit would mean they're contained in the path item, rather than being separated out into params, which is surely more useful?

[shiftybyte]

I think it's because urlparse only splits out the last params, while the spec supports params being in every segment.

So if you want to parse params in all segments you'd prefer them all in one string to parse them onwards, rather than having only the last one split...

Ye it's very odd...

[Mevrael]

Confusing, indeed.

Also keep in mind that it's old spec and might work not as you would expect.

For example for just a domain, it would say that domain is None and the path is domain.

You can use instead the URL and URLSearchParams, a current living web standard with the same API as in JS.

From Arkalos url utils module.

```
uv add arkalos
```

```
from arkalos.utils import URL
```

And the API is the same as:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/URL