Parsing A List Into A Url String

I have a list of tags that I would like to add to a url string, separated by commas ('%2C'). How can I do this ? I was trying : >>> tags_list ['tag1', ' tag2'] >>>

Solution 1:

parse_string = ("http://www.google.pl/search?q=%s&restofurl" % 
               '%2C'.join(tag.strip() for tag in tags_list))

Results in:

>>>parse_string = ("http://www.google.pl/search?q=%s&restofurl" %...'%2C'.join(tag.strip() for tag in tags_list))>>>parse_string
'http://www.google.pl/search?q=tag1%2Ctag2&restofurl'

Side note: Going forward I think you want to use format() for string interpolation, e.g.:

>>>parse_string = "http://www.google.pl/search?q={0}&restofurl".format(...'%2C'.join(tag.strip() for tag in tags_list))>>>parse_string
'http://www.google.pl/search?q=tag1%2Ctag2&restofurl'

Solution 2:

"%s" is fine, but urlparse.urlunparse after urllib.urlencode is safer.

str.join is fine, but remember to check your tags for commas and number signs, or use urllib.quote on each one.