How to percent-encode url parameters in python?

Question

If I do

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

1. It doens't encode "/" to "%2F" (breaks OAuth normalization)
2. It doens't handle unicode (it throw an exception)

is there a better library?

Answer 1

From the docs:

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', '')
'%2Ftest'

About the second issue, there is a bug report about it here. Apparently it was fixed in python 3. You can workaround it by encoding as utf8 like this:

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

By the way have a look at urlencode