Python converting characters to URL encoding

Question

I am trying to convert texts into URLs, but certain characters are not being converted as I'm expecting. For example:

>>> import urllib
>>> my_text="City of Liège"
>>> my_url=urllib.parse.quote(my_text,safe='')
>>> my_url
'City%20of%20Li%C3%A8ge'

The spaces get converted properly, however, the "è" should get converted into %E8, but it is returned as %C3%A8. What am I missing ? I am using Python 3.6.

alkanen · Accepted Answer · 2017-12-03 09:38:29Z

2

Your string is UTF-8 encoded, and the URL encoded string reflects this.

0xC3A8 is the UTF-8 encoding of the Unicode value U+00E8, which is described as "LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH GRAVE".

In order to get the string you are after, you need to let Python know which codepage you're using, like this:

my_text=bytes("City of Liège",'cp1252')

edited Dec 3, 2017 at 9:38

answered Dec 1, 2017 at 22:27

alkanen

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6 Comments

horace_vr Over a year ago

So how should I change my code in order to get the desired result ?

alkanen Over a year ago

Try replacing the assignment with this and see what happens: my_text = "City of Liège".decode('utf-8')

alkanen Over a year ago

I don't have the same version of python as you do, so I can't do the urllib.parse.quote() step to verify that it works. Sorry about that. But what I can do is see that the string prints as u'City of Li\xe8ge', which looks more like what you're after.

horace_vr Over a year ago

I get AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'decode'. I am using Python 3.6.1

horace_vr Over a year ago

Based on your comment, I needed to convert text encoding to into cp1252, like this: my_text=bytes("City of Liège",'cp1252'). If you change your answer to incorporate this, I will accept it.

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