current community

your communities

more stack exchange communities

company blog
Stack Exchange Inbox Reputation and Badges
tour help
Join the Stack Overflow Community
Stack Overflow is a community of 6.4 million programmers, just like you, helping each other.
Join them; it only takes a minute:
Sign up
up vote 155 down vote favorite
40

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?

share|improve this question
up vote 223 down vote accepted

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', safe='')
'%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

share|improve this answer
    
Thanks you, both worked great. urlencode just calls quoteplus many times in a loop, which isn't the correct normalization for my task (oauth). – Paul Tarjan Nov 8 '09 at 9:14
3  
the spec: rfc 2396 defines these as reserved reserved = ";" | "/" | "?" | ":" | "@" | "&" | "=" | "+" | "$" | "," Which is what urllib.quote is dealing with. – Jeff Sheffield Sep 23 '15 at 17:42
12  
urllib.quote moved to urlib.parse.quote, since Python3. – Hibou57 Dec 8 '15 at 6:28
up vote 64 down vote

In Python 3, urllib.quote has been moved to urllib.parse.quote and it does handle unicode by default.

>>> from urllib.parse import quote
>>> quote('/test')
'/test'
>>> quote('/test', safe='')
'%2Ftest'
>>> quote('/El Niño/')
'/El%20Ni%C3%B1o/'
share|improve this answer
up vote 15 down vote

My answer is similar to Paolo's answer.

I think module requests is much better. It's based on urllib3. You can try this:

>>> from requests.utils import quote
>>> quote('/test')
'/test'
>>> quote('/test', safe='')
'%2Ftest'
share|improve this answer
1  
requests.utils.quote is link to python quote. See request sources. – Cjkjvfnby Aug 5 '15 at 14:11
6  
requests.utils.quote is a thin compatibility wrapper to urllib.quote for python 2 and urllib.parse.quote for python 3 – Jeff Sheffield Sep 23 '15 at 17:30
up vote 2 down vote

If you're using django, you can use urlquote:

>>> from django.utils.http import urlquote
>>> urlquote(u"Müller")
u'M%C3%BCller'
share|improve this answer

Your Answer

 
discard

By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.