URL encoding in python

Question

Is there a simple method I\'m missing in urllib or other library for this task? URL encoding replaces unsafe ASCII characters with a \"%\" followed by two hexa

Answer 1

Keep in mind that both urllib.quote and urllib.quote_plus throw an error if an input is a unicode string:

s = u'\u2013'
urllib.quote(s)

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
  File "C:\Python27\lib\urllib.py", line 1303, in quote
    return ''.join(map(quoter, s))
KeyError: u'\u2013'

As answered here on SO, one has to use 'UTF-8' explicitly:

urllib.quote(s.encode('utf-8'))