How can I percent-encode URL parameters in Python?

by

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 “https://stackoverflow.com/”

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

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