How can I encode and decode percent-encoded (URL encoded) strings in Python?

Question

How can I decode percent-encoded characters to ordinary unicode characters?

• Input string: Lech_Kaczy%C5%84ski
• Desired output: Lech_Kaczyński

I tried urllib.unquote(text) but then got Lech_Kaczy\xc5\x84ski.

I also tried the following, but it doesn't change the result:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import sys
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding("utf-8")

Answer 1

For Python 3, using urllib.parse.unquote:

from urllib.parse import unquote

print(unquote("Lech_Kaczy%C5%84ski"))

Output:

Lech_Kaczyński

Answer 2

For Python 2, using urllib.unquote:

import urllib
urllib.unquote("Lech_Kaczy%C5%84ski").decode('utf8')

This will return a unicode string:

u'Lech_Kaczy\u0144ski'

which you can then print and process as usual. For example:

print(urllib.unquote("Lech_Kaczy%C5%84ski").decode('utf8'))

will result in

Lech_Kaczyński

Answer 3

This worked for me:

import urllib

print urllib.unquote('Lech_Kaczy%C5%84ski')

Prints out

Lech_Kaczyński