pythonpython-2.7encodingutf-8urldecode

URL decode UTF-8 in Python

In Python 2.7, given a URL like:

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

How can I decode it to the expected result, example.com?title==правовая+защита?

I tried url=urllib.unquote(url.encode("utf8")), but it seems to give a wrong result.

Solution

  • 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')