How to fetch a non-ascii url with urlopen?

Strictly speaking URIs can't contain non-ASCII characters; what you have there is an IRI.

To convert an IRI to a plain ASCII URI:

• non-ASCII characters in the hostname part of the address have to be encoded using the Punycode-based IDNA algorithm;

• non-ASCII characters in the path, and most of the other parts of the address have to be encoded using UTF-8 and %-encoding, as per Ignacio's answer.

So:

import re, urlparsedef urlEncodeNonAscii(b):    return re.sub('[\x80-\xFF]', lambda c: '%%%02x' % ord(c.group(0)), b)def iriToUri(iri):    parts= urlparse.urlparse(iri)    return urlparse.urlunparse(        part.encode('idna') if parti==1 else urlEncodeNonAscii(part.encode('utf-8'))        for parti, part in enumerate(parts)    )>>> iriToUri(u'http://www.a\u0131b.com/a\u0131b')'http://www.xn--ab-hpa.com/a%c4%b1b'

(Technically this still isn't quite good enough in the general case because urlparse doesn't split away any user:pass@ prefix or :port suffix on the hostname. Only the hostname part should be IDNA encoded. It's easier to encode using normal urllib.quote and .encode('idna') at the time you're constructing a URL than to have to pull an IRI apart.)

In python3, use the urllib.parse.quote function on the non-ascii string:

>>> from urllib.request import urlopen                                                                                                                                                            >>> from urllib.parse import quote                                                                                                                                                                >>> chinese_wikipedia = 'http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:' + quote('首页')>>> urlopen(chinese_wikipedia)

Python 3 has libraries to handle this situation. Useurllib.parse.urlsplit to split the URL into its components, andurllib.parse.quote to properly quote/escape the unicode charactersand urllib.parse.urlunsplit to join it back together.

>>> import urllib.parse>>> url = 'http://example.com/unicodè'>>> url = urllib.parse.urlsplit(url)>>> url = list(url)>>> url[2] = urllib.parse.quote(url[2])>>> url = urllib.parse.urlunsplit(url)>>> print(url)http://example.com/unicod%C3%A8