urllib.quote() throws KeyError

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You are trying to quote Unicode data, so you need to decide how to turn that into URL-safe bytes.

Encode the string to bytes first. UTF-8 is often used:

>>> import urllib
>>> urllib.quote(u'sch\xe9nefeld')
/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/urllib.py:1268: UnicodeWarning: Unicode equal comparison failed to convert both arguments to Unicode - interpreting them as being unequal
  return ''.join(map(quoter, s))
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/urllib.py", line 1268, in quote
    return ''.join(map(quoter, s))
KeyError: u'\xe9'
>>> urllib.quote(u'sch\xe9nefeld'.encode('utf8'))
'sch%C3%A9nefeld'

However, the encoding depends on what the server will accept. It’s best to stick to the encoding the original form was sent with.

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