Python Text Processing - Extract URL from Text

URL extraction is achieved from a text file by using regular expression. The expression fetches the text wherever it matches the pattern. Only the re module is used for this purpose.

Example - Reading URLs from a file

We can take a input file containig some URLs and process it thorugh the following program to extract the URLs. The findall()function is used to find all instances matching with the regular expression.

Inout File - url_example.txt

Shown is the input file below. Which contains teo URLs.

Now a days you can learn almost anything by just visiting http://www.google.com. But if you are completely new to computers or internet then first you need to leanr those fundamentals. Next
you can visit a good e-learning site like - https://www.tutorialspoint.com to learn further on a variety of subjects.

Now, when we take the above input file and process it through the following program we get the required output whihc gives only the URLs extracted from the file.

main.py

import re
 
with open("url_example.txt") as file:
   for line in file:
      urls = re.findall('https?://(?:[-\w.]|(?:%[\da-fA-F]{2}))+', line)
      print(urls)

Output

When we run the above program we get the following output −

['http://www.google.com.']
['https://www.tutorialspoint.com']