mutable-url 0.1.1

MutableURL class for editing URLs

mutable_url.py

This repository holds the source for the mutable_url Python package.

This provides one utility class, MutableURL.

It also has one hook-point, configure_idna, to allow callers to opt into using correct modern DNS internationalised hostnames; the default is to use only the IDNA support in Python stdlib, which is out of date but usually good enough.

from mutable_url import MutableURL

u = MutableURL('http://www.example.org/hum')
u.scheme = https

print(u)
call_func_wanting_url(u.url)

u2 = MutableURL.from_parts(scheme='https', host='www.example.com',
                           query_params={'foo': 'bar', 'baz': '3'})

The from_parts class-method constructor requires keyword invocation. You can start with an empty URL. There is no default scheme. At present, the query_params values must be strings.

A MutableURL can be reconstructed into a string form via str() or by using the .url property (which just does that for you). This is the most stable interface for passing into other URL handling classes: I haven't found any other intermediate representation for cross-API compatibility worth the added complexity.

The Authority section is supported, including further virtualized accessors to allow individual access to username and password fields. Either one can be empty, to support auth schemes which only use one or the other (such as issued tokens provided as a password for an empty user).

The hostname part has two forms, which differ only when IDNA internationalisation is in play:

• host: the on-the-wire ASCII form (ACE), which is also what appears in the URL
• hostname: the presentation-layer form, as UTF-8

There are multiple accessors for query parameters handling:

• query_params: a simple dict view which assumes keys are not repeated
• query_params_multi: a dict where the value is a list of strings, one for each instance
• query_params_list: a list of (key,value) tuples.

Fragments are supported.

AI Disclosures

The original implementation of MutableURL was written by a human and committed to a private repository on 2018-04-27. That initial version depended upon urllib3 (by way of requests).

On 2026-02-18, Anthropic's Claude was used to rewrite the implementation; the code was subjected to thorough human code-review and there were many iterations as aspects were refined. The goal was to move to only depending upon the Python stdlib, to add more accessors (for compatibility with API expectations of both urllib and urllib3), and to add tests. Along the way, we also collected IDNA support, while keeping the default as stdlib-only.