Python encode spaces in url only and not other special characters

Question

I know this question has been asked many times but I can’t seem to find the variation that I’m looking for specifically.

I have a url, lets say its:

https://somethingA/somethingB/somethingC/some spaces here

I want to convert it to:

https://somethingA/somethingB/somethingC/some%20spaces%20here

I know I can do it with the replace function like below:

url = https://somethingA/somethingB/somethingC/some spaces here
url.replace(' ', '%20')

But I have a feeling that the best practice is probably to use the urllib.parse library. The problem is that when I use it, it encodes other special characters like : too.

So if I do:

url = https://somethingA/somethingB/somethingC/some spaces here
urllib.parse.quote(url)

I get:

https%3A//somethingA/somethingB/somethingC/some%20spaces%20here

Notice the : also gets converted to %3A. So my question is, is there a way I can achieve the same thing as replace with urllib? I think I would rather use a tried and tested library that is designed specifically to encode URLs instead of reinventing the wheel, which I may or may not be missing something leading to a security loop hole. Thank you.

Asked By: Mark

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Source

Answer 1

So quote() there is built to work on just the path portion of a url. So you need to break things up a bit like this:

from urllib.parse import urlparse
url = 'https://somethingA/somethingB/somethingC/some spaces here'
parts = urlparse(url)
fixed_url = f"{parts.scheme}://{parts.netloc}/{urllib.parse.quote(parts.path)}"

Answered By: Frank Wiles

Python encode spaces in url only and not other special characters

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