How to percent-encode URL parameters in Python?

Python 2

From the docs:

urllib.quote(string[, safe])

Replace special characters in string using the %xx escape. Letters, digits, and the characters '_.-' are never quoted. By default, this function is intended for quoting the path section of the URL.The optional safe parameter specifies additional characters that should not be quoted — its default value is '/'

That means passing '' for safe will solve your first issue:

>>> urllib.quote('/test')
'/test'
>>> urllib.quote('/test', safe='')
'%2Ftest'

About the second issue, there is a bug report about it here. Apparently it was fixed in python 3. You can workaround it by encoding as utf8 like this:

>>> query = urllib.quote(u"Müller".encode('utf8'))
>>> print urllib.unquote(query).decode('utf8')
Müller

By the way have a look at urlencode

Python 3

The same, except replace urllib.quote with urllib.parse.quote.

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'