How to find "complicated" URLs in a text file - regex

Question

I'm using the following regex to find URLs in a text file:
/http[s]?://(?:[a-zA-Z]|[0-9]|[$-_#.&+]|[!*\(\),]|(?:%[0-9a-fA-F][0-9a-fA-F]))+/
It outputs the following:
http://rda.ucar.edu/datasets/ds117.0/.
http://rda.ucar.edu/datasets/ds111.1/.
http://www.discover-earth.org/index.html).
http://community.eosdis.nasa.gov/measures/).
Ideally they would print out this:
http://rda.ucar.edu/datasets/ds117.0/
http://rda.ucar.edu/datasets/ds111.1/
http://www.discover-earth.org/index.html
http://community.eosdis.nasa.gov/measures/
Any ideas on how I should tweak my regex?
Thank you in advance!
UPDATE - Example of the text would be:
this is a test http://rda.ucar.edu/datasets/ds117.0/. and I want this to be copied over http://rda.ucar.edu/datasets/ds111.1/. http://www.discover-earth.org/index.html). http://community.eosdis.nasa.gov/measures/).

Answer 1

This will trim your output containing trail characters, ) .
import re
regx= re.compile(r'(?m)[\.\)]+$')
print(regx.sub('', your_output))
And this regex seems workable to extract URL from your original sample text.
https?:[\S]*\/(?:\w+(?:\.\w+)?)?
Demo,,, ( edited from https?:[\S]*\/)
Python script may be something like this
ss=""" this is a test http://rda.ucar.edu/datasets/ds117.0/. and I want this to be copied over http://rda.ucar.edu/datasets/ds111.1/. http://www.discover-earth.org/index.html). http://community.eosdis.nasa.gov/measures/). """
regx= re.compile(r'https?:[\S]*\/(?:\w+(?:\.\w+)?)?')
for m in regx.findall(ss):
print(m)

Answer 2

So for the urls you have here:
https://regex101.com/r/uSlkcQ/4
Pattern explanation:
Protocols (e.g. https://)
^[A-Za-z]{3,9}:(?://)
Look for recurring .[-;:&=+\$,\w]+-class (www.sub.domain.com)
(?:[\-;:&=\+\$,\w]+\.?)+`
Look for recurring /[\-;:&=\+\$,\w\.]+ (/some.path/to/somewhere)
(?:\/[\-;:&=\+\$,\w\.]+)+
Now, for your special case: ensure that the last character is not a dot or a parenthesis, using negative lookahead
(?!\.|\)).
The full pattern is then
^[A-Za-z]{3,9}:(?://)(?:[\-;:&=\+\$,\w]+\.?)+(?:\/[\-;:&=\+\$,\w\.]+)+(?!\.|\)).

Answer 3

There are a few things to improve or change in your existing regex to allow this to work:
http[s]? can be changed to https?. They're identical. No use putting s in its own character class
[a-zA-Z]|[0-9]|[$-_#.&+]|[!*\(\),] You can shorten this entire thing and combine character classes instead of using | between them. This not only improves performance, but also allows you to combine certain ranges into existing character class tokens. Simplifying this, we get [a-zA-Z0-9$-_#.&+!*\(\),]
We can go one step further: a-zA-Z0-9_ is the same as \w. So we can replace those in the character class to get [\w$-#.&+!*\(\),]
In the original regex we have $-_. This creates a range so it actually inclues everything between $ and _ on the ASCII table. This will cause unwanted characters to be matched: $%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?#ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_. There are a few options to fix this:
[-\w$#.&+!*\(\),] Place - at the start of the character class
[\w$#.&+!*\(\),-] Place - at the end of the character class
[\w$\-#.&+!*\(\),] Escape - such that you have \- instead
You don't need to escape ( and ) in the character class: [\w$#.&+!*(),-]
[0-9a-fA-F][0-9a-fA-F] You don't need to specify [0-9a-fA-F] twice. Just use a quantifier like so: [0-9a-fA-F]{2}
(?:%[0-9a-fA-F][0-9a-fA-F]) The non-capture group isn't actually needed here, so we can drop it (it adds another step that the regex engine needs to perform, which is unnecessary)
So the result of just simplifying your existing regex is the following:
https?://(?:[$\w#.&+!*(),-]|%[0-9a-fA-F]{2})+
Now you'll notice it doesn't match / so we need to add that to the character class. Your regex was matching this originally because it has an improper range $-_.
https?://(?:[$\w#.&+!*(),/-]|%[0-9a-fA-F]{2})+
Unfortunately, even with this change, it'll still match ). at the end. That's because your regex isn't told to stop matching after /. Even implementing this will now cause it to not match file names like index.html. So a better solution is needed. If you give me a couple of days, I'm working on a fully functional RFC-compliant regex that matches URLs. I figured, in the meantime, I would at least explain why your regex isn't working as you'd expect it to.

Answer 4

Thanks all for the responses. A coworker ended up helping me with it. Here is the solution:
des_links = re.findall('http[s]?://(?:[a-zA-Z]|[0-9]|[$-_#.&+]|[!*\(\),]|(?:%[0-9a-fA-F][0-9a-fA-F]))+', des)
for i in des_links:
tmps = "/".join(i.split('/')[0:-1])
print(tmps)