Changing hostname in a url

You can use urllib.parse.urlparse function and ParseResult._replace method (Python 3):

>>> import urllib.parse
>>> parsed = urllib.parse.urlparse("https://www.google.dk:80/barbaz")
>>> replaced = parsed._replace(netloc="www.foo.dk:80")
>>> print(replaced)
ParseResult(scheme='https', netloc='www.foo.dk:80', path='/barbaz', params='', query='', fragment='')

If you're using Python 2, then replace urllib.parse with urlparse.

ParseResult is a subclass of namedtuple and _replace is a namedtuple method that:

returns a new instance of the named tuple replacing specified fields with new values

UPDATE:

As @2rs2ts said in the comment netloc attribute includes a port number.

Good news: ParseResult has hostname and port attributes. Bad news: hostname and port are not the members of namedtuple, they're dynamic properties and you can't do parsed._replace(hostname="www.foo.dk"). It'll throw an exception.

If you don't want to split on : and your url always has a port number and doesn't have username and password (that's urls like "https://username:[email protected]:80/barbaz") you can do:

parsed._replace(netloc="{}:{}".format(parsed.hostname, parsed.port))

You can take advantage of urlsplit and urlunsplit from Python's urlparse:

>>> from urlparse import urlsplit, urlunsplit
>>> url = list(urlsplit('https://www.google.dk:80/barbaz'))
>>> url
['https', 'www.google.dk:80', '/barbaz', '', '']
>>> url[1] = 'www.foo.dk:80'
>>> new_url = urlunsplit(url)
>>> new_url
'https://www.foo.dk:80/barbaz'

As the docs state, the argument passed to urlunsplit() "can be any five-item iterable", so the above code works as expected.

Using urlparse and urlunparse methods of urlparse module:

import urlparse

old_url = 'https://www.google.dk:80/barbaz'
url_lst = list(urlparse.urlparse(old_url))
# Now url_lst is ['https', 'www.google.dk:80', '/barbaz', '', '', '']
url_lst[1] = 'www.foo.dk:80'
# Now url_lst is ['https', 'www.foo.dk:80', '/barbaz', '', '', '']
new_url = urlparse.urlunparse(url_lst)

print(old_url)
print(new_url)

Output:

https://www.google.dk:80/barbaz
https://www.foo.dk:80/barbaz

A simple string replace of the host in the netloc also works in most cases:

>>> p = urlparse.urlparse('https://www.google.dk:80/barbaz')
>>> p._replace(netloc=p.netloc.replace(p.hostname, 'www.foo.dk')).geturl()
'https://www.foo.dk:80/barbaz'

This will not work if, by some chance, the user name or password matches the hostname. You cannot limit str.replace to replace the last occurrence only, so instead we can use split and join:

>>> p = urlparse.urlparse('https://www.google.dk:[email protected]:80/barbaz')
>>> new_netloc = 'www.foo.dk'.join(p.netloc.rsplit(p.hostname, 1))
>>> p._replace(netloc=new_netloc).geturl()
'https://www.google.dk:[email protected]:80/barbaz'