Decode escaped characters in URL

Question

I have a list containing URLs with escaped characters in them. Those characters have been set by urllib2.urlopen when it recovers the html page:

http://www.sample1webpage.com/index.php?title=%E9%A6%96%E9%A1%B5&action=edit http://www.sample1webpage.com/index.php?title=%E9%A6%96%E9%A1%B5&action=history http://www.sample1webpage.com/index.php?title=%E9%A6%96%E9%A1%B5&variant=zh  

Is there a way to transform them back to their unescaped form in python?

P.S.: The URLs are encoded in utf-8

Answer 1

Using urllib package (import urllib) :

Python 2.7

From official documentation :

urllib.unquote(string)

Replace %xx escapes by their single-character equivalent.

Example: unquote('/%7Econnolly/') yields '/~connolly/'.

Python 3

From official documentation :

urllib.parse.unquote(string, encoding='utf-8', errors='replace')

[…]

Example: unquote('/El%20Ni%C3%B1o/') yields '/El Niño/'.