How can I percent-encode URL parameters in Python?

Question

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?

Dallon

These are not URL parameters, FYI. You should clarify. – Superego

What is the language-agnostic canonical Stack Overflow question? (That is, only covering the encoding, not how it is achieved.) – Wives

@JamieMarshall what should they be called then if not URL parameters? – Donation

@BenCreasy- attributes. The specification for URL describes parameters as a separate part of the URL (not involving the query string). reference here I can't tell you how much time I've lost trying to authenticate an API because they were asking for parameters and I was sending query attributes. – Superego

Answer 1

From the Python 3 documentation:

urllib.parse.quote(string, safe='/', encoding=None, errors=None)

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 a URL. The optional safe parameter specifies additional ASCII characters that should not be quoted — its default value is '/'.

That means passing '' for safe will solve your first issue:

>>> import urllib.parse
>>> urllib.parse.quote('/test')
'/test'
>>> urllib.parse.quote('/test', safe='')
'%2Ftest'

(The function quote was moved from urllib to urllib.parse in Python 3.)

By the way, have a look at urlencode.

---

About the second issue, there was a bug report about it and it was fixed in Python 3.

For Python 2, you can work around it by encoding as UTF-8 like this:

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

Bent

Thanks you, both worked great. urlencode just calls quoteplus many times in a loop, which isn't the correct normalization for my task (oauth). – Dallon

the spec: rfc 2396 defines these as reserved reserved = ";" | "/" | "?" | ":" | "@" | "&" | "=" | "+" | "$" | "," Which is what urllib.quote is dealing with. – Kindhearted

urllib.parse.quote docs – Greenwich

Also, in the case of encoding a search query, you maybe better off using quote_plus: docs.python.org/3/library/… 1. It encodes slashes by default 2. It also encodes spaces – Nyssa

six.moves.urllib.parse.quote(u"Müller".encode('utf8')) for Python 2 and 3. – Ephraim

if you wanna retain the colon from http: , do urllib.parse.quote('http://example.com/some path/').replace('%3A', ':') – Electronics

@Electronics Just use urllib.parse.quote(url, safe=':/'). Even better, encode some path, then join strings. This is Python, not PHP. – Tank

safe="" is missing in Python 3 answer! – Istanbul

Answer 2

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/'

Irradiate

The name quote is rather vague as a global. It might be nicer to use something like urlencode: from urllib.parse import quote as urlencode. – Jadajadd

Note that there is a function named urlencode in urllib.parse already that does something completely different, so you'd be better off picking another name or risk seriously confusing future readers of your code. – Pervious

(style suggestion: @Jadajadd i agree that quote is "rather vague". rather than rename the variable/object to something else you can leave the name fully qualified as urllib.parse.quote. leaving it fully qualified does two things: takes a little extra time typing and saves time reading and maintaining the code. ) – Abhorrent

Answer 3

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.}

Barrybarrymore

requests.utils.quote is link to python quote. See request sources. – Profit

requests.utils.quote is a thin compatibility wrapper to urllib.quote for python 2 and urllib.parse.quote for python 3 – Kindhearted

without reading the comments, this is creating confusion... – Istanbul

Answer 4

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)

Phi

it's deprecated from Django 3.0+ – Apiece

Answer 5

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"http://example.com?{encoded}")
http://example.com?p=lskdfj%2Fsdfkjdf%2Fksdfj+skfj&val=34

Documentation

• urlencode

• quote_plus

Guardrail

Answer 6

An alternative method using furl:

import furl

url = "https://httpbin.org/get?hello,world"
print(url)
url = furl.furl(url).url
print(url)

Output:

https://httpbin.org/get?hello,world
https://httpbin.org/get?hello%2Cworld

Consistent