Have a look at this module: werkzeug.utils. (now in werkzeug.urls
)
The function you are looking for is called “url_fix” and works like this:
>>> from werkzeug.urls import url_fix
>>> url_fix(u'http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elf (Begriffsklärung)')
'http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elf%20%28Begriffskl%C3%A4rung%29'
It’s implemented in Werkzeug as follows:
import urllib
import urlparse
def url_fix(s, charset="utf-8"):
"""Sometimes you get an URL by a user that just isn't a real
URL because it contains unsafe characters like ' ' and so on. This
function can fix some of the problems in a similar way browsers
handle data entered by the user:
>>> url_fix(u'http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elf (Begriffsklärung)')
'http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elf%20%28Begriffskl%C3%A4rung%29'
:param charset: The target charset for the URL if the url was
given as unicode string.
"""
if isinstance(s, unicode):
s = s.encode(charset, 'ignore')
scheme, netloc, path, qs, anchor = urlparse.urlsplit(s)
path = urllib.quote(path, '/%')
qs = urllib.quote_plus(qs, ':&=')
return urlparse.urlunsplit((scheme, netloc, path, qs, anchor))