“Syntax Error GraphQL request” with “&” in query

Question

I query a database with this simple python code below. It works fine for all regions except those with "&" in the name, like "Latin America & Caribbean". When I hit these regions I get the syntax error. Could anyone suggest how to fix the problem?

My code:

import requests

def get_data(query):    
    url = "https://API_URL/graphql?query=" + query
    try:
        response = requests.get(url, cert=('xxx.crt', 'xxx.key'),  verify='xxx.crt')
        print("api responds with: HTTP " + str(response.status_code))
    except requests.exceptions.RequestException as e:
        print("-- error getting data from api: " + str(e))
    else:
        data = response.text
        print(data)
        return data


query = '''
query {
  pages(region:"Latin America & Caribbean",
    From:"May 6 2017 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (GMT)", 
    To: "May 7 2017 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (GMT)")
  {
    _id
  }

    }
'''
get_data(query)

Error:

api responds with: HTTP 400
{"errors":[{"message":"Syntax Error GraphQL request (3:48) Unterminated string.\n\n2: query {\n3:   pages(region:\"Latin America \n                                                  ^\n","locations":[{"line":3,"column":48}]}]}

Answer 1

& is a reserved character inside URLs, and so needs to be escaped. I believe you can utilize urllib's quote function to escape reserved and unsafe characters in your query string before appending it to the rest of your url.