Curious to see alternate approach on a search/replace via regex

[Nick Mellor]

Hi RH,

translate methods might be faster (and a little easier to read) for your use case. Just precompute and re-use the translation table punct_flatten.

Note that the translate method has changed somewhat for Python 3 due to the separation of text from bytes. The is a Python 3 version.

from urllib.parse import urlparse

flattened_chars = "./&=?"
punct_flatten = str.maketrans(flattened_chars, '_' * len(flattened_chars))
parts = urlparse('http://alongnameofasite1234567.com/q?sports=run&a=1&b=1')
unflattened = parts.netloc + parts.path + parts.query
flattened = unflattened.translate(punct_flatten)
print (flattened)

Cheers,

Nick

On Thursday, 7 February 2013 08:41:05 UTC+11, rh  wrote:
> I am curious to know if others would have done this differently. And if so
> 
> how so?
> 
> 
> 
> This converts a url to a more easily managed filename, stripping the
> 
> http protocol off. 
> 
> 
> 
> This:
> 
>  
> 
> http://alongnameofasite1234567.com/q?sports=run&a=1&b=1
> 
> 
> 
> becomes this:
> 
> 
> 
> alongnameofasite1234567_com_q_sports_run_a_1_b_1
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> def u2f(u):
> 
>     nx = re.compile(r'https?://(.+)$')
> 
>     u = nx.search(u).group(1)
> 
>     ux = re.compile(r'([-:./?&=]+)')
> 
>     return ux.sub('_', u)
> 
> 
> 
> One alternate is to not do the compile step. There must also be a way to
> 
> do it all at once. i.e. remove the protocol and replace the chars.