How to unquote URL quoted UTF-8 strings in Python

Question

thestring = urllib.quote(thestring.encode('utf-8'))

This will encode it. How to decode it?

Answer 1

What about

backtonormal = urllib.unquote(thestring)

Answer 2

if you mean to decode a string from utf-8, you can first transform the string to unicode and then to any other encoding you would like (or leave it in unicode), like this

unicodethestring = unicode(thestring, 'utf-8')
latin1thestring = unicodethestring.encode('latin-1','ignore')

'ignore' meaning that if you encounter a character that is not in the latin-1 character set you ignore this character.