python - Decode escaped characters in URL

89
votes

I have a list containing URLs with escaped characters in them. Those characters have been set by urllib2.urlopen when it recovers the html page:

http://www.sample1webpage.com/index.php?title=%E9%A6%96%E9%A1%B5&action=edit
http://www.sample1webpage.com/index.php?title=%E9%A6%96%E9%A1%B5&action=history
http://www.sample1webpage.com/index.php?title=%E9%A6%96%E9%A1%B5&variant=zh

Is there a way to transform them back to their unescaped form in python?

P.S.: The URLs are encoded in utf-8

5
pythonescaping

5 Answers

157
votes

Official docs.

urllib.unquote(string)

Replace %xx escapes by their single-character equivalent.

Example: unquote('/%7Econnolly/') yields '/~connolly/'.

And then just decode.

Update: For Python 3, write the following:

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

Python 3 docs.

31
votes

And if you are using Python3 you could use:

import urllib.parse
urllib.parse.unquote(url)
13
votes

or urllib.unquote_plus

>>> import urllib
>>> urllib.unquote('erythrocyte+membrane+protein+1%2C+PfEMP1+%28VAR%29')
'erythrocyte+membrane+protein+1,+PfEMP1+(VAR)'
>>> urllib.unquote_plus('erythrocyte+membrane+protein+1%2C+PfEMP1+%28VAR%29')
'erythrocyte membrane protein 1, PfEMP1 (VAR)'
6
votes
import re

def unquote(url):
  return re.compile('%([0-9a-fA-F]{2})',re.M).sub(lambda m: chr(int(m.group(1),16)), url)