encoding - Url decode UTF-8 in Python

297
votes

I have spent plenty of time as far as I am newbie in Python.
How could I ever decode such a URL:

example.com?title=%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D1%8F+%D0%B7%D0%B0%D1%89%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%B0

to this one in python 2.7: example.com?title==правовая+защита

url=urllib.unquote(url.encode("utf8")) is returning something very ugly.

Still no solution, any help is appreciated.

3
pythonencodingutf-8urldecode
In the general case, the tail of a URL is just a cookie. You can't know which local character-set encoding the server uses or even whether the URL encodes a string or something completely different. (Granted, many URLs do encode a human-readable string; and often, you can guess the encoding very easily. But it's not possible in the generally case or completely automatically.) - tripleee

3 Answers

486
votes

The data is UTF-8 encoded bytes escaped with URL quoting, so you want to decode, with urllib.parse.unquote(), which handles decoding from percent-encoded data to UTF-8 bytes and then to text, transparently:

from urllib.parse import unquote

url = unquote(url)

Demo:

>>> from urllib.parse import unquote
>>> url = 'example.com?title=%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D1%8F+%D0%B7%D0%B0%D1%89%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%B0'
>>> unquote(url)
'example.com?title=правовая+защита'

The Python 2 equivalent is urllib.unquote(), but this returns a bytestring, so you'd have to decode manually:

from urllib import unquote

url = unquote(url).decode('utf8')
153
votes

If you are using Python 3, you can use urllib.parse

url = """example.com?title=%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D1%8F+%D0%B7%D0%B0%D1%89%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%B0"""

import urllib.parse
urllib.parse.unquote(url)

gives:

'example.com?title=правовая+защита'
11
votes

You can achieve an expected result with requests library as well:

import requests

url = "http://www.mywebsite.org/Data%20Set.zip"

print(f"Before: {url}")
print(f"After:  {requests.utils.unquote(url)}")

Output:

$ python3 test_url_unquote.py

Before: http://www.mywebsite.org/Data%20Set.zip
After:  http://www.mywebsite.org/Data Set.zip

Might be handy if you are already using requests, without using another library for this job.