urllib.parse.urlencode()

urllib.parse.urlencode(query, doseq=False, safe='', encoding=None, errors=None, quote_via=quote_plus)

Convert a mapping object or a sequence of two-element tuples, which may contain str or bytes objects, to a percent-encoded ASCII text string. If the resultant string is to be used as a data for POST operation with the urlopen() function, then it should be encoded to bytes, otherwise it would result in a TypeError.

The resulting string is a series of key=value pairs separated by '&' characters, where both key and value are quoted using the quote_via function. By default, quote_plus() is used to quote the values, which means spaces are quoted as a '+' character and ‘/’ characters are encoded as %2F, which follows the standard for GET requests (application/x-www-form-urlencoded). An alternate function that can be passed as quote_via is quote(), which will encode spaces as %20 and not encode ‘/’ characters. For maximum control of what is quoted, use quote and specify a value for safe.

When a sequence of two-element tuples is used as the query argument, the first element of each tuple is a key and the second is a value. The value element in itself can be a sequence and in that case, if the optional parameter doseq is evaluates to True, individual key=value pairs separated by '&' are generated for each element of the value sequence for the key. The order of parameters in the encoded string will match the order of parameter tuples in the sequence.

The safe, encoding, and errors parameters are passed down to quote_via (the encoding and errors parameters are only passed when a query element is a str).

To reverse this encoding process, parse_qs() and parse_qsl() are provided in this module to parse query strings into Python data structures.

Refer to urllib examples to find out how urlencode method can be used for generating query string for a URL or data for POST.