How to unencode a string

[jakecjacobson]

This seems like a real simple newbie question but how can a person
unencode a string? In Perl I use something like: "$part=~ s/\%([A-Fa-
f0-9]{2})/pack('C', hex($1))/seg;"

If I have a string like Word1%20Word2%20Word3 I want to get Word1
Word2 Word3. Would also like to handle special characters like '",(){}
[] etc/

 

[Chris Rebert]

This seems like a real simple newbie question but how can a person
unencode a string?  In Perl I use something like: "$part=~ s/\%([A-Fa-
f0-9]{2})/pack('C', hex($1))/seg;"

If I have a string like Word1%20Word2%20Word3 I want to get Word1
Word2 Word3.  Would also like to handle special characters like '",(){}
[] etc/

Use the `uu` module together with the `stringio` module:
http://docs.python.org/library/uu.html
http://docs.python.org/library/stringio.html

Not sure about special character handling though.

Cheers,
Chris

 

[MRAB]

This seems like a real simple newbie question but how can a person
unencode a string? In Perl I use something like: "$part=~ s/\%([A-Fa-
f0-9]{2})/pack('C', hex($1))/seg;"

If I have a string like Word1%20Word2%20Word3 I want to get Word1
Word2 Word3. Would also like to handle special characters like '",(){}
[] etc/

The Python equivalent of your regular expression code is:

>>> import re
>>> s = "Word1%20Word2%20Word3"
>>> re.sub(r"%([A-Fa-f0-9]{2})", lambda m: chr(int(m.group(1), 16)), s)

'Word1 Word2 Word3'

The replacement is a lambda expression (an anonymous function), which is
called for each match with the match object and it works like this:

m # m is the match object
m.group(1) # get group 1 (the 2 hex digits)
int(m.group(1), 16) # convert to an integer
chr(int(m.group(1), 16)) # convert to a character

 

[Piet van Oostrum]

j> This seems like a real simple newbie question but how can a person
j> unencode a string? In Perl I use something like: "$part=~ s/\%([A-Fa-
j> f0-9]{2})/pack('C', hex($1))/seg;"

j> If I have a string like Word1%20Word2%20Word3 I want to get Word1
j> Word2 Word3.
urllib.unquote(string)

j> Would also like to handle special characters like '",(){}
j> [] etc/

What would you like to do with them? Or do you mean to replace %27 by ' etc?

 

[Chris Rebert]

This seems like a real simple newbie question but how can a person
unencode a string?  In Perl I use something like: "$part=~ s/\%([A-Fa-
f0-9]{2})/pack('C', hex($1))/seg;"

If I have a string like Word1%20Word2%20Word3 I want to get Word1
Word2 Word3.  Would also like to handle special characters like '",(){}
[] etc/

Use the `uu` module together with the `stringio` module:
http://docs.python.org/library/uu.html
http://docs.python.org/library/stringio.html

Not sure about special character handling though.

Ah, I misread our post in haste. Please disregard my reply.

- Chris

 

[jakecjacobson]

jakecjacobson <[email protected]> (j) wrote:

j> This seems like a real simple newbie question but how can a person
j> unencode a string?  In Perl I use something like: "$part=~ s/\%([A-Fa-
j> f0-9]{2})/pack('C', hex($1))/seg;"
j> If I have a string like Word1%20Word2%20Word3 I want to get Word1
j> Word2 Word3.  
urllib.unquote(string)

j> Would also like to handle special characters like '",(){}
j> [] etc/

What would you like to do with them? Or do you mean to replace %27 by ' etc?

Yes, take '%27' and replace with ', etc.