Dropbox files names containing accented characters

omz

I think this would be the correct way to decode the URL:

url = unicode(urllib.unquote(url), 'utf-8')

or alternatively (but more confusing):

url = urllib.unquote(url).decode('utf-8')

Edit: Looks like @dgelessus was faster than me...

cvp

Thanks champions! My code had a misplaced right parenthesis which thus gave a bad answer.
One more time, shame on me.

cvp

Sorry, but I still have problems with that.

Try this short code,
if the URL is passed "by appex", it is NOT OK
if the URL is set as text for testing, it's OK

# coding: utf-8
import urllib
import appex

#url = 'https://www.dropbox.com/s/5mmxh7h7vu2lwnp/La%20vie%20tr%C3%A8s%20priv%C3%A9e%20de%20Monsieur%20Sim.png?dl=0'
url = appex.get_url()
print url
print urllib.unquote(url).decode('utf-8')

omz

appex.get_url() returns a unicode string, so you need an extra encode there...

import urllib

# This is a unicode string literal (note the 'u' before the quotes), to simulate the behavior of appex.get_url():
url = u'https://www.dropbox.com/s/5mmxh7h7vu2lwnp/La%20vie%20tr%C3%A8s%20priv%C3%A9e%20de%20Monsieur%20Sim.png'
print urllib.unquote(url.encode('utf-8')).decode('utf-8')

And no, you're not the only one who finds this very confusing. ;)

cvp

My god! (Not you, but almost)

omz

The good news is, this kind of stuff is generally a bit easier in Python 3 because pretty much every string is unicode there, and urllib.parse.unquote (the Python 3 equivalent of urllib.unquote) can handle unicode, so it would be just urllib.parse.unquote(url) in Python 3, regardless of whether url was defined as a normal string literal, or returned by appex.get_url.

dgelessus

Well this is confusing. Though here the issue looks like it's with urllib.unquote - it seems to be designed for str strings and gets confused with unicode strings. In Python 3 it's a lot better (as always) - there the string is decoded as UTF-8 by default, and you can set a different encoding if necessary.

cvp

I'm really still a beginner in Python and, of course, I'll buy the next version, but I hope you'll give some explanation how to convert my scripts for this version, when it would be available.

dgelessus

@cvp There is the 2to3 tool which can do most of the dumb work for you (e. g. putting parentheses around your print calls). I'm not sure how well it corrects the bytes/str/unicode mess that you need in Python 2. Probably not very much, as it's hard to guess whether a encode or decode is actually necessary or just a compatibility hack.

cvp

Ok, I'll try to remember when I'll use Python 3, thanks