A regular expression (regex) is a sequence of characters that defines a search pattern in text. To remove URLs from a string in Python, you can either use regular expressions (regex) or some external libraries like urllib.parse. The re-module in Python is used for working with regular expressions. In this article, we will see how we can remove URLs from a string in Python.

Python Remove URLs from a String

Below are the ways by which we can remove URLs from a string in Python:

• Using the re.sub() function
• Using the re.findall() function
• Using the re.search() function
• Using the urllib.parse class

Python Remove URLs from String Using re.sub() function

In this example, the code defines a function ‘remove_urls’ to find URLs in text and replace them with a placeholder [URL REMOVED], using regular expressions for pattern matching and the re.sub() method for substitution.

Original Text:
Visit on GeeksforGeeks Website: /archive/

Text with URLs Removed:
Visit on GeeksforGeeks Website: [URL REMOVED]

Remove URLs from String Using re.findall() function

In this example, the Python code defines a function ‘remove_urls_findall’ that uses regular expressions to find all URLs using re.findall() method in a given text and replaces them with a replacement text “[URL REMOVED]”.

Output:

Using re.findall():
Original Text:
Check out the latest Python tutorials on GeeksforGeeks: /archive/category/python/
Text with URLs Removed:
Check out the latest Python tutorials on GeeksforGeeks: [URL REMOVED]

Remove URLs from String in Python Using re.search() function

In this example, the Python code defines a function ‘remove_urls_search’ using regular expressions and re.search() to find and replace URLs in a given text with a replacement text “[URL REMOVED]”.

Output:

Using re.search():
Original Text:
Visit our website at https://horje.org/ for more information. Follow us on Twitter: @horje
Text with URLs Removed:
Visit our website at [URL REMOVED] for more information. Follow us on Twitter: @horje

Remove URLs from String Using urllib.parse

In this example, the Python code defines a function ‘remove_urls_urllib’ that uses urllib.parse to check and replace URLs in a given text with a replacement text “[URL REMOVED]”.

Using urllib.parse:
Text with URLs Removed:
Check out the GeeksforGeeks website at [URL REMOVED] for programming tutorials.