Pressing the Red Button

To urlencode a querystring or form data in python you can use the urllib module:

use urllib
# you have to pass in a dictionary
print urllib.urlencode({'id':'100', 'name':'john smith'})

# then you get 'id=100&name=john+smith'

Urlencoding Unicode and UTF8 Values

#this works fine
print urllib.urlencode({name:'José'})

#you have to be careful with unicode strings
# this will throw an error:
print urllib.urlencode({name:u'José'})
# UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in 
# position 11: ordinal not in range

#since the default ascii conversion can't handle the 'é',
# you have to be explicit in what charset you are using
print urllib.urlencode({'name':u'José'.encode('utf8')})

Additional Info:
Python Doc for urllib module
Unicode Primer