Question

I’m trying to get a handler mapping working with Google App Engine.

The regex is like this:

('/api/1/apps/([-0-9a-zA-Z]+)/values/(.+)', ApiValueHandler)

When the URL looks like /api/1/apps/50b96eb0/values/New%20note%2Fhello the value that gets passed to my handler is New%20note/hello. As you can see it’s unescaping the slash, but not the space.

Is there a setting I’m missing somewhere, or do I need to do some unescaping myself? If there are some values it will never unescape is there a list of these somewhere?

Updated:

Here’s a test app that shows this behaviour when run on the dev server on Windows 7 with Python 2.5.

main.py

from google.appengine.ext import webapp
from google.appengine.ext.webapp import util

class MainHandler(webapp.RequestHandler):
    def get(self, blah):
        self.response.out.write(blah)

app = webapp.WSGIApplication([('/(.*)', MainHandler)], debug=True)
util.run_wsgi_app(app)

app.yaml

application: engineapp
version: 1
runtime: python
api_version: 1

handlers:
- url: .*
  script: main.py

Answer 1

Not escaped characters are defined by quote: letters, digits, _.- and the default safe character /.

http://docs.python.org/library/urllib.html#urllib.quote

Just use unquote on the matched string.

>>> urllib.unquote('/%24/')
'/$/'

http://docs.python.org/library/urllib.html#urllib.unquote