Question

How do I enclose a variable within single quotations in python? It’s probably very simple but I can’t seem to get it! I need to url-encode the variable term. Term is entered in a form by a user and is passed to a function where it is url-encoded term=urllib.quote(term). If the user entered “apple computer” as their term, after url-encoding it would be “apple%20comptuer”. What I want to do is have the term surrounded by single-quotes before url encoding, so that it will be “‘apple computer'” then after url-encoding “%23apple%20computer%23”. I need to pass the term to a url and it won’t work unless I use this syntax. Any suggestions?

Sample Code:

import urllib2
import requests    

def encode():
        import urllib2
        query= avariable #The word this variable= is to be enclosed by single quotes
        query = urllib2.quote(query)
        return dict(query=query)

def results():

    bing = "https://api.datamarket.azure.com/Data.ashx/Bing/SearchWeb/Web?Query=%(query)s&$top=50&$format=json"
    API_KEY = 'akey'

    r = requests.get(bing % encode(), auth=('', API_KEY))
    return r.json

Answer 1

There are four ways:

1. string concatenation

   term = urllib.quote("'" + term + "'")
   

2. old-style string formatting

   term = urllib.quote("'%s'" % (term,))
   

3. new-style string formatting

   term = urllib.quote("'{}'".format(term))
   

4. f-string style formatting (python 3.6+)

   term = urllib.quote(f"'{term}'")