UTF-8 percentage encoding and python

Your file has to encode your string as utf-8 before quoting it, and the string should be unicode. Also you have to specify the appropriate file encoding for your source file in the coding section:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import urllib

s = u'î'
print urllib.quote(s.encode('utf-8'))

Gives me the output:

%C3%AE