Question

I have the following code in Python:

linkHTML = "<a href=\"page?q=%s\">click here</a>" % strLink

The problem is that when strLink has spaces in it the link shows up as

<a href="page?q=with space">click here</a>

I can use strLink.replace(” “,”+”)

But I am sure there are other characters which can cause errors. I tried using

urllib.quote(strLink)

But it doesn’t seem to help.

Thanks!
Joel

Answer 1

Make sure you use the urllib.quote_plus(string[, safe]) to replace spaces with plus sign.

urllib.quote_plus(string[, safe])

Like quote(), but also replaces spaces
by plus signs, as required for quoting
HTML form values when building up a
query string to go into a URL. Plus
signs in the original string are
escaped unless they are included in
safe. It also does not have safe
default to ‘/’.

from http://docs.python.org/library/urllib.html#urllib.quote_plus

Ideally you’d be using the urllib.urlencode function and passing it a sequence of key/value pairs like {[“q”,”with space”],[“s”,”with space & other”]} etc.