How do you build a URL that contains a username and password from user input in Python?

Question

I see you can parse usernames and passwords with:

from urlparse import urlparse
r = urlparse('http://myuser:mypass@example.com')
print r.username
# => 'myuser'

How can I go the other way? I can't use urlunparse because I can't do this:

r.username = request.args['username']
# => AttributeError: can't set attribute

I'm interested because the username contains characters that need escaped (namely: @ , / ).

Edit:

This string is coming from user input, so I won't know ahead of time what it is. It's a security risk to maintain your own list of escape characters, so string concatenation and custom character escaping with replace won't help here.

Answer 1

Turns out the username part of basic auth URLs use the same escape characters that query parameters do.

So the answer is to use urllib.quote(username, safe='') then concatenate. ( You'll need the safe parameter or / won't be escapted.)