How to fetch a non-ascii url with Python urlopen?

Question

I need to fetch data from a URL with non-ascii characters but urllib2.urlopen refuses to open the resource and raises:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u0131' in position 26: ordinal not in range(128)

I know the URL is not standards compliant but I have no chance to change it.

What is the way to access a resource pointed by a URL containing non-ascii characters using Python?

edit: In other words, can / how urlopen open a URL like:

http://example.org/Ñöñ-ÅŞÇİİ/

Answer 1

Use iri2uri method of httplib2. It makes the same thing as by bobin (is he/she the author of that?)

Answer 2

Based on @darkfeline answer:

from urllib.parse import urlsplit, urlunsplit, quote

def iri2uri(iri):
    """
    Convert an IRI to a URI (Python 3).
    """
    uri = ''
    if isinstance(iri, str):
        (scheme, netloc, path, query, fragment) = urlsplit(iri)
        scheme = quote(scheme)
        netloc = netloc.encode('idna').decode('utf-8')
        path = quote(path)
        query = quote(query)
        fragment = quote(fragment)
        uri = urlunsplit((scheme, netloc, path, query, fragment))

    return uri

Answer 3

It is more complex than the accepted @bobince's answer suggests:

• netloc should be encoded using IDNA;
• non-ascii URL path should be encoded to UTF-8 and then percent-escaped;
• non-ascii query parameters should be encoded to the encoding of a page URL was extracted from (or to the encoding server uses), then percent-escaped.

This is how all browsers work; it is specified in https://url.spec.whatwg.org/ - see this example. A Python implementation can be found in w3lib (this is the library Scrapy is using); see w3lib.url.safe_url_string:

from w3lib.url import safe_url_string
url = safe_url_string(u'http://example.org/Ñöñ-ÅŞÇİİ/', encoding="<page encoding>")

An easy way to check if a URL escaping implementation is incorrect/incomplete is to check if it provides 'page encoding' argument or not.

Answer 4

Encode the unicode to UTF-8, then URL-encode.

Answer 5

works! finally

I could not avoid from this strange characters, but at the end I come through it.

import urllib.request
import os


url = "http://www.fourtourismblog.it/le-nuove-tendenze-del-marketing-tenere-docchio/"
with urllib.request.urlopen(url) as file:
    html = file.read()
with open("marketingturismo.html", "w", encoding='utf-8') as file:
    file.write(str(html.decode('utf-8')))
os.system("marketingturismo.html")

Answer 6

In python3, use the urllib.parse.quote function on the non-ascii string:

>>> from urllib.request import urlopen                                                                                                                                                            
>>> from urllib.parse import quote                                                                                                                                                                
>>> chinese_wikipedia = 'http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:' + quote('首页')
>>> urlopen(chinese_wikipedia)