[python] How to percent-encode URL parameters in Python?

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?

It is better to use urlencode here. Not much difference for single parameter but IMHO makes the code clearer. (It looks confusing to see a function quote_plus! especially those coming from other languates)

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

Docs

urlencode: https://docs.python.org/3/library/urllib.parse.html#urllib.parse.urlencode

quote_plus: https://docs.python.org/3/library/urllib.parse.html#urllib.parse.quote_plus

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/'

My answer is similar to Paolo's answer.

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'

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 since this answer was published 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)