urlencode an array of values

Question

I\'m trying to urlencode an dictionary in python with urllib.urlencode. The problem is, I have to encode an array.

The result needs to be:

criterias%         


        

Answer 1

To abstract this out to work for any parameter dictionary and convert it into a list of tuples:

import urllib

def url_encode_params(params={}):
    if not isinstance(params, dict): 
        raise Exception("You must pass in a dictionary!")
    params_list = []
    for k,v in params.items():
        if isinstance(v, list): params_list.extend([(k, x) for x in v])
        else: params_list.append((k, v))
    return urllib.urlencode(params_list)

Which should now work for both the above example as well as a dictionary with some strings and some arrays as values:

criterias = ['member', 'issue']
params = {
    'criterias[]': criterias,
}
url_encode_params(params)
>>'criterias%5B%5D=member&criterias%5B%5D=issue'