Question

I’m using a url to get the Longitudes and Latitudes for a given city. When I passed
“New York” as the string it wont give any results, but when I passed “New%20York” it did. How to pass the New York like words to a query string?

current_location = 'New york' #not working
current_location2 = 'New%20York' # working
location_string = 'http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=' +current_location+ '&sensor=false'

Answer 1

Use urllib.quote() or urllib.quote_plus() to replace characters with their %xx equivalents or urllib.urlencode() to construct the query string from a dictionary of variables you intend to go into the URL. Example:

>>> import urllib
>>> urllib.quote('New York')
'New%20York'
>>> urllib.quote_plus('New York')
'New+York'
>>> urllib.urlencode({'address': 'New York', 'sensor': 'false'})
'sensor=false&address=New+York'