urllib ¶

def quote(s, safe = '/'):
    """quote('abc def') -> 'abc%20def'

    Each part of a URL, e.g. the path info, the query, etc., has a
    different set of reserved characters that must be quoted.

    RFC 2396 Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax lists
    the following reserved characters.

    reserved    = ";" | "/" | "?" | ":" | "@" | "&" | "=" | "+" |
                  "$" | ","

    Each of these characters is reserved in some component of a URL,
    but not necessarily in all of them.

    By default, the quote function is intended for quoting the path
    section of a URL.  Thus, it will not encode '/'.  This character
    is reserved, but in typical usage the quote function is being
    called on a path where the existing slash characters are used as
    reserved characters.
    """
    cachekey = (safe, always_safe)
    try:
        safe_map = _safemaps[cachekey]
    except KeyError:
        safe += always_safe
        safe_map = {}
        for i in range(256):
            c = chr(i)
            safe_map[c] = (c in safe) and c or ('%%%02X' % i)
        _safemaps[cachekey] = safe_map
    res = map(safe_map.__getitem__, s)
    return ''.join(res)

def quote_plus(s, safe = ''):
    """Quote the query fragment of a URL; replacing ' ' with '+'"""
    if ' ' in s:
        s = quote(s, safe + ' ')
        return s.replace(' ', '+')
    return quote(s, safe)