If __str__ is meant to be a user-understandable way of expressing an URL, the best way to do that is to show it the same way user sees it in usually. This is now done by .geturl() call.

This way I wouldn't have to remember to serialize it in cases where I want to display an URL to user:

    url = urlparse.urlparse(sys.args[1])
    ...
    print "Downloading {1}".format(url)

would mean: "show me that URL".

And if you would like to display its internal representation as a record of scheme/host/path/..., you always have __repr__. Currently both __str__ and __repr__ return `ParsedResult(scheme="http", netloc='example.com', ...)`