Function
urllib.quote

Signature

quote(s, safe='/')

Documentation String

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.