How to deal with unicode string in URL in python3?

Question

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*- 
# Python3
import urllib
import urllib.request as url_req
opener = url_req.build_opener()
url='http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/'+"毛泽东"
opener.open(url).read()
# opener.open(url.encode("utf-8")).read()
# # doesn't work either

When I run it, it complains that:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 10-12: ordinal not in range(128)

But I can't use .encode() either as it will complain:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "t.py", line 8, in <module>
    opener.open(url.encode("utf-8")).read()
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/python3/3.2.2/lib/python3.2/urllib/request.py", line 360, in open
    req.timeout = timeout
AttributeError: 'bytes' object has no attribute 'timeout'

Anyone knows how to deal with that?

Answer 1

You could use urllib.parse.quote() to encode the path section of URL.

#!/usr/bin/env python3
from urllib.parse   import quote
from urllib.request import urlopen

url = 'http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/' + quote("毛泽东")
content = urlopen(url).read()

Answer 2

The fantastic requests library does this for you out of the box:

>>> url='http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/'+"毛泽东"
>>> import requests
>>> r = requests.get(url)
>>> len(r.content)
818747