Parse URL parameter and create a dictionary

January 18, 2024

I want to have the URL parameters as a "real" dict. How can I achieve that? I don’t want to use params.split() multiple times.

from urllib.parse import urlparse

url = 'http://nohost.com?params=depth:1,width:500,size:small'

the_url = urlparse(url)
url_part, params = the_url.path, the_url.query

print(params)  # params=depth:1,width:500,size:small

At the end of the day I want to have a real dictionary from the URL parameters

params = {'depth': 1, 'width': 500, 'size': 'small'}

>Solution :

You have to parse the params yourselves. As @jonrsharpe pointed out in the comments, you can choose to use parse_qs to get a dict of list after parsing the output of urlparse and then pretty much implement the parsing logic.

Something like this,

from urllib.parse import urlparse, parse_qs

url = 'http://nohost.com?params=depth:1,width:500,size:small'

url_parts = urlparse(url)
parsed_str = parse_qs(url_parts.query)['params'][0]

params_dict = {
    key: int(value) if value.isdigit() else value
    for key, value in (pair.split(':') for pair in parsed_str.split(','))
}


print(params_dict) # {'depth': 1, 'width': 500, 'size': 'small'}