urllib2.urlopen('http://foo/url and spaces') will send a HTTP request line like this to the server:

GET /url and spaces HTTP/1.1

which the server obviously does not understand. This contrasts with urllib's behaviour which replaces the spaces (' ') in the url with '%20'.

Related: #918368 #1153027

I have used the quote method to percent encode the url for spaces and similar characters. This is my first patch. Please let me know if there is anything wrong. I will correct and re-submit it. I ran the test_urllib2.py which gave an OK for 34 tests.

Changes are made in two instances:
1. in the open method.
2. in the __init__ of Request class to ensure that the same issue is addressed at the time of creating Request objects.

Seems good.

Patch attached for python3, with unit tests.

FWIW, I don't think it is a good idea to escape automatically. It will change the behaviour in a non-backward compatible way for existing applications that pass encoded urls to this function.

I think the existing behaviour is better. The documentation and the failure mode for passing URLs with spaces could however be improved.

Here the patch for python2.


kiilerix, RFC 1738 explicitly says that the space character shall not be used.

Yes, the url sent by urllib2 must not contain spaces. In my opinion the only way to handle that correctly is to not pass urls with spaces to urlopen. Escaping the urls is not a good solution - even if the API was to be designed from scratch. It would be better to raise an exception if it is passed an invalid url.

Note for example that '/' and the %-encoding of '/' are different, and it must thus be possible to pass an url containing both to urlopen. That is not possible if it automically escapes.