<p>So I'm using python to do some parsing of web pages and I want to split the full web address into two parts. Say I have the address <a href="http://www.stackoverflow.com/questions/ask">http://www.stackoverflow.com/questions/ask</a>. I would need the protocol and domain (e.g. <a href="http://www.stackoverflow.com">http://www.stackoverflow.com</a>) and the path (e.g. /questions/ask). I figured this might be solved by some regex, however I'm not so handy with that. Any suggestions?</p>

```
```
import re
url = "http://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask"
protocol, domain = re.match(r"(http://[^/]*)(.*)", url).groups()
```
```