If I do

url = "" + 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?

5 Answers

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 '/'

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 

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/' 

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' 

_{My answer is similar to Paolo's answer.}

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

>>> from django.utils.http import urlquote >>> urlquote(u"Müller") u'M%C3%BCller' 

Note that changes to Python mean that this is now a legacy wrapper. From the Django 2.1 source code for django.utils.http:

A legacy compatibility wrapper to Python's urllib.parse.quote() function. (was used for unicode handling on Python 2) 

It is better to use urlencode here. There isn't much difference for a single parameter, but, IMHO, it makes the code clearer. (It looks confusing to see a function quote_plus! - especially those coming from other languages.)

In [21]: query='lskdfj/sdfkjdf/ksdfj skfj' In [22]: val=34 In [23]: from urllib.parse import urlencode In [24]: encoded = urlencode(dict(p=query,val=val)) In [25]: print(f"") 

Documentation

• urlencode

• quote_plus