I see no problem in going ahead with the suggestion proposed and the patch.

- I checked with RFC3986 Section 2.5
http://labs.apache.org/webarch/uri/rfc/rfc3986.html#identifying-data

Relevant line:
When a new URI scheme defines a component that represents textual data consisting of characters from the Universal Character Set [UCS], the data should first be encoded as octets according to the UTF-8 character encoding [STD63]; then only those octets that do not correspond to characters in the unreserved set should be percent-encoded.

- This is done already in quote and quote_plus. 
- It just boils down to urlencode also providing the same facility for query strings and that was the point of this bug report.

Jeremy, I shall go ahead with this and do the modifications, if required.