How can I percent-encode URL parameters in Python?

Question

If I do

url = "http://example.com?p=" + urllib.quote(query) 

1. It doesn't encode / to %2F (breaks OAuth normalization)
2. It doesn't handle Unicode (it throws an exception)

Is there a better library?

Answer 1

Python 2

From the documentation:

urllib.quote(string[, safe]) 

Replace special characters in string using the %xx escape. Letters, digits, and the characters '_.-' are never quoted. By default, this function is intended for quoting the path section of the URL.The optional safe parameter specifies additional characters that should not be quoted — its default value is '/'

That means passing '' for safe will solve your first issue:

>>> urllib.quote('/test') '/test' >>> urllib.quote('/test', safe='') '%2Ftest' 

About the second issue, there is a bug report about it. Apparently it was fixed in Python 3. You can workaround it by encoding as UTF-8 like this:

>>> query = urllib.quote(u"Müller".encode('utf8')) >>> print urllib.unquote(query).decode('utf8') Müller 

By the way, have a look at urlencode.

Python 3

In Python 3, the function quote has been moved to urllib.parse:

>>> import urllib.parse >>> print(urllib.parse.quote("Müller".encode('utf8'))) M%C3%BCller >>> print(urllib.parse.unquote("M%C3%BCller")) Müller