python - Decode escaped characters in URL

Question

I have a list containing URLs with escaped characters in them. Those characters have been set by urllib2.urlopen when it recovers the html page:

http://www.sample1webpage.com/index.php?title=%E9%A6%96%E9%A1%B5&action=edit
http://www.sample1webpage.com/index.php?title=%E9%A6%96%E9%A1%B5&action=history
http://www.sample1webpage.com/index.php?title=%E9%A6%96%E9%A1%B5&variant=zh 

Is there a way to transform them back to their unescaped form in python?

P.S.: The URLs are encoded in utf-8

Answer 1

Official docs.

urllib.unquote(string)

Replace %xx escapes by their single-character equivalent.

Example: unquote('/%7Econnolly/') yields '/~connolly/'.

And then just decode.

---

Update: For Python 3, write the following:

import urllib.parse
urllib.parse.unquote(url)

Python 3 docs.