Python: How to Unescape String (DecodeURI in JavaScript)

Decoding

We can use urllib module to do this. This is on Python 2.7x and Python 3+ (added).

#!/usr/bin/env python2 """urllib module - Python 2.7x""" import urllib # ENCODED STRING THE_ENCODED_STRING = "https%3A%2F%2Flalala.com%2Flalala%3Fla%3Dla%26lala%3Dlala" # DECODED STRING THE_DECODED_STRING = urllib.unquote(THE_ENCODED_STRING) print(THE_DECODED_STRING) """ Python 3+ """ import urllib.parse # ENCODED STRING THE_ENCODED_STRING = "https%3A%2F%2Flalala.com%2Flalala%3Fla%3Dla%26lala%3Dlala" # DECODED STRING THE_DECODED_STRING = urllib.parse.unquote(THE_ENCODED_STRING) print(THE_DECODED_STRING)

• Documentation for urllib.unquote Python 2 utility.
• Documentation for urllib.parse.unquote Python 3 utility.

---

Encoding

The opposite of that function is urllib.quote(string) (Python 2) with additional argument to create a custom safe characters list. This is the documentation.

For Python 3, there is urllib.parse.quote(). But there are others: quote_plus and quote_from_bytes.

This is the urllib.parse.quote() documentation for Python 3.