The urllib.parse module contains an undocumented function unwrap:

    unwrap('<URL:type://host/path>') --> 'type://host/path'

This is useful. I've been re-inventing this function in many of my scripts, because I didn't know it existed (not documented!) and only stumbled across it by accident today, where I see it was deprecated in  #27485 but I can't see any reason for the deprecation.

If not for the deprecation, I would certainly use this unwrap function in preference to rolling my own.

It seems to me that this might have been a case of an over-enthusiastic change. #27485 talks about deprecating the various split* functions, which are officially redundant (urlparse and urlsplit are preferred) but doesn't talk about unwrap, which is useful and (in my opinion) should have been documented rather than deprecated.

I suspect the only reason was that unwrap was caught in the bag of «undocumented functions (that don‘t seem useful)».

Personally I think I see more bare URLs than URLs in angle brackets these days, and `URL:` feels like an archaic marker :)  But I don’t see any harm in un-deprecating and documenting the function now that you say you would find it useful.

New changeset 674ee1260025ff36f27e5d70ff6b66e3aab880bf by Cheryl Sabella (Rémi Lapeyre) in branch 'master':
bpo-35397: Remove deprecation and document urllib.parse.unwrap (GH-11481)
https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/674ee1260025ff36f27e5d70ff6b66e3aab880bf

Thanks for the report and for the patch.  :-)