Question

I am using wikipedia api and using following api request,

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?`action=query&meta=globaluserinfo&guiuser='$cammer'&guiprop=groups|merged|unattached&format=json`

but the problem is I am unable to escape Dollar Sign and similar characters like that, I tried the following but it didn’t work,

    r['guiprop'] = u'groups|merged|unattached'
    r['guiuser'] = u'$cammer'

I found it this in w3school but checking this for every single character would a pain full, what would be the best way to escape this in the strip.http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp

Answer 1

You should take a look at using urlencode.

from urllib import urlencode

base_url = "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?"

arguments = dict(action="query",
                 meta="globaluserinfo",
                 guiuser="$cammer",
                 guiprop="groups|merged|unattached",
                 format="json")
url = base_url + urlencode(arguments)

If you don’t need to build a complete url you can just use the quote function for a single string:

>>> import urllib
>>> urllib.quote("$cammer")
'%24cammer'

So you end up with:

r['guiprop'] = urllib.quote(u'groups|merged|unattached')
r['guiuser'] = urllib.quote(u'$cammer')