Question

I have a unicode string like '%C3%A7%C3%B6asd+fjkls%25asd' and I want to decode this string.
I used urllib.unquote_plus(str) but it works wrong.

• expected : çöasd+fjkls%asd
• result : çöasd fjkls%asd

double coded utf-8 characters(%C3%A7 and %C3%B6) are decoded wrong.
My python version is 2.7 under a linux distro.
What is the best way to get expected result?

Answer 1

You have 3 or 4 or 5 problems … but repr() and unicodedata.name() are your friends; they unambiguously show you exactly what you have got, without the confusion engendered by people with different console encodings communicating the results of print fubar.

Summary: either (a) you start with a unicode object and apply the unquote function to that or (b) you start off with a str object and your console encoding is not UTF-8.

If as you say you start off with a unicode object:

>>> s0 = u'%C3%A7%C3%B6asd+fjkls%25asd'
>>> print repr(s0)
u'%C3%A7%C3%B6asd+fjkls%25asd'

this is an accidental nonsense. If you apply urllibX.unquote_YYYY() to it, you get another nonsense unicode object (u'\xc3\xa7\xc3\xb6asd+fjkls%asd') which would cause your shown symptoms when printed. You should convert your original unicode object to a str object immediately:

>>> s1 = s0.encode('ascii')
>>> print repr(s1)
'%C3%A7%C3%B6asd+fjkls%25asd'

then you should unquote it:

>>> import urllib2
>>> s2 = urllib2.unquote(s1)
>>> print repr(s2)
'\xc3\xa7\xc3\xb6asd+fjkls%asd'

Looking at the first 4 bytes of that, it’s encoded in UTF-8. If you do print s2, it will look OK if your console is expecting UTF-8, but if it’s expecting ISO-8859-1 (aka latin1) you’ll see your symptomatic rubbish (first char will be A-tilde). Let’s park that thought for a moment and convert it to a Unicode object:

>>> s3 = s2.decode('utf8')
>>> print repr(s3)
u'\xe7\xf6asd+fjkls%asd'

and inspect it to see what we’ve actually got:

>>> import unicodedata
>>> for c in s3[:6]:
...     print repr(c), unicodedata.name(c)
...
u'\xe7' LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA
u'\xf6' LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH DIAERESIS
u'a' LATIN SMALL LETTER A
u's' LATIN SMALL LETTER S
u'd' LATIN SMALL LETTER D
u'+' PLUS SIGN

Looks like what you said you expected. Now we come to the question of displaying it on your console. Note: don’t freak out when you see “cp850”; I’m doing this portably and just happen to be doing this in a Command Prompt on Windows.

>>> import sys
>>> sys.stdout.encoding
'cp850'
>>> print s3
çöasd+fjkls%asd

Note: the unicode object was explicitly encoded using sys.stdout.encoding. Fortunately all the unicode characters in s3 are representable in that encoding (and cp1252 and latin1).