Python 3: Convert string from utf-8 to ascii

Question

I am using Python 3.x and have a string that contains utf-8 characters, like this:

link='https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com'

I would now like to convert the string to ascii, so that it reads 'https://www.google.com'. How can I achieve this? I have tried

link.decode('utf-8')

which throws the exception:

AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'decode'

Is there not an easy way to simply decode a string containing utf-8 characters to plain ascii characters?

There are no UTF-8 characters in that string (except the ones which are plain ASCII are of course technicalny *also* UTF-8 characters, trivially). — tripleee, Jan 09 '19 at 18:34

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 09 '19 at 18:18

0

You should use urllib.parse.unquote, it will automatically handle the decoding for you https://docs.python.org/3/library/urllib.parse.html#urllib.parse.unquote :

$ python
Python 3.7.0 (v3.7.0:1bf9cc5093, Jun 26 2018, 23:26:24)
>>> from urllib.parse import unquote
>>> url = unquote('https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com')
>>> url
'https://www.google.com'

answered Jan 09 '19 at 18:18

d g

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Thank you, exactly what I was looking for. – Tartan Leaves Jan 09 '19 at 20:05

Python 3: Convert string from utf-8 to ascii

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