Error with urlencode in python

Question

I have this:

a = {'album': u'Metamorphine', 'group': 'monoku', 'name': u'Son Of Venus (Danny\xb4s Song)', 'artist': u'Leandra', 'checksum': '2836e33d42baf947e8c8adef48921f2f76fcb37eea9c50b0b59d7651', 'track_number': 8, 'year': '2008', 'genre': 'Darkwave', 'path': u'/media/data/musik/Leandra/2008. Metamorphine/08. Son Of Venus (Danny\xb4s Song).mp3', 'user_email': '[email protected]', 'size': 6624104}
data = urllib.urlencode(mp3_data)

And that raise an exception:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "playkud.py", line 44, in <module>
    main()
  File "playkud.py", line 29, in main
    craw(args, options.user_email, options.group)
  File "/home/diegueus9/workspace/playku/src/client/playkud/crawler/crawler.py", line 76, in craw
    index(root, file, data, user_email, group)
  File "/home/diegueus9/workspace/playku/src/client/playkud/crawler/crawler.py", line 58, in index
    done = add_song(data[mp3file])
  File "/home/diegueus9/workspace/playku/src/client/playkud/service.py", line 32, in add_song
    return make_request(URL+'add_song/', data)
  File "/home/diegueus9/workspace/playku/src/client/playkud/service.py", line 14, in make_request
    data = urllib.urlencode(dict([k.encode('utf-8'),v] for k,v in mp3_data.items()))
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/urllib.py", line 1250, in urlencode
    v = quote_plus(str(v))
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xb4' in position 19: ordinal not in range(128)

and with ipython (2.5):

In [7]: urllib.urlencode(a)
UnicodeEncodeError                        Traceback (most recent call last)

/home/diegueus9/<ipython console> in <module>()

/usr/lib/python2.5/urllib.pyc in urlencode(query, doseq)
   1248         for k, v in query:
   1249             k = quote_plus(str(k))
-> 1250             v = quote_plus(str(v))
   1251             l.append(k + '=' + v)
   1252     else:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xb4' in position 19: ordinal not in range(128)

How i can fix it?

Answer 1

The urlencode library expects data in str format, and doesn't deal well with Unicode data since it doesn't provide a way to specify an encoding. Try this instead:

mp3_data = {'album': u'Metamorphine',
     'group': 'monoku',
     'name': u'Son Of Venus (Danny\xb4s Song)',
     'artist': u'Leandra',
     'checksum': '2836e33d42baf947e8c8adef48921f2f76fcb37eea9c50b0b59d7651',
     'track_number': 8,
     'year': '2008', 'genre': 'Darkwave',
     'path': u'/media/data/musik/Leandra/2008. Metamorphine/08. Son Of Venus (Danny\xb4s Song).mp3',
     'user_email': '[email protected]',
     'size': 6624104}

str_mp3_data = {}
for k, v in mp3_data.iteritems():
    str_mp3_data[k] = unicode(v).encode('utf-8')
data = urllib.urlencode(str_mp3_data)

What I did was ensure that all data is encoded into str using UTF-8 before passing the dictionary into the urlencode function.