Is there a unicode-ready substitute I can use for urllib.quote and urllib.unquote in Python 2.6.5?

Question

Python\'s urllib.quote and urllib.unquote do not handle Unicode correctly in Python 2.6.5. This is what happens:

In [5]: print urll         


        

Answer 1

I encountered the same problem and used a helper function to deal with non-ascii and urllib.urlencode function (which includes quote and unquote):

def utf8_urlencode(params):
    import urllib as u
    # problem: u.urlencode(params.items()) is not unicode-safe. Must encode all params strings as utf8 first.
    # UTF-8 encodes all the keys and values in params dictionary
    for k,v in params.items():
        # TRY urllib.unquote_plus(artist.encode('utf-8')).decode('utf-8')
        if type(v) in (int, long, float):
            params[k] = v
        else:
            try:
                params[k.encode('utf-8')] = v.encode('utf-8')
            except Exception as e:
                logging.warning( '**ERROR utf8_urlencode ERROR** %s' % e )
    return u.urlencode(params.items()).decode('utf-8')

adopted from Unicode URL encode / decode with Python