urllib.quote() throws KeyError

Question

To encode the URI, I used urllib.quote(\"schönefeld\") but when some non-ascii characters exists in string, it thorws

KeyError: u\'\\xe9\'
Code:         


        

Answer 1

I had the exact same error as @underscore but in my case the problem was that map(quoter,s) tried to look for the key u'\xe9' which was not in the _safe_map. However \xe9 was, so I solved the issue by replacing u'\xe9' by \xe9 in s.

Moreover, shouldn't the return statement be within the try/except ? I also had to change this to completely solve the problem.

Answer 2

You are trying to quote Unicode data, so you need to decide how to turn that into URL-safe bytes.

Encode the string to bytes first. UTF-8 is often used:

>>> import urllib
>>> urllib.quote(u'sch\xe9nefeld')
/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/urllib.py:1268: UnicodeWarning: Unicode equal comparison failed to convert both arguments to Unicode - interpreting them as being unequal
  return ''.join(map(quoter, s))
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/urllib.py", line 1268, in quote
    return ''.join(map(quoter, s))
KeyError: u'\xe9'
>>> urllib.quote(u'sch\xe9nefeld'.encode('utf8'))
'sch%C3%A9nefeld'

However, the encoding depends on what the server will accept. It's best to stick to the encoding the original form was sent with.

Answer 3

By just converting the string to unicode I resolved the issue.

here is the snippet:

try:
    unicode(mystring, "ascii")
except UnicodeError:
    mystring = unicode(mystring, "utf-8")
else:
    pass

Detailed description of solution can be found at http://effbot.org/pyfaq/what-does-unicodeerror-ascii-decoding-encoding-error-ordinal-not-in-range-128-mean.htm