Agressive URL encode

agressive-url-encode.md

Agressive URL encode

Python based CLI tool to agressively url-encode strings, rather than just encoding non-url characters this tool will encode every character in the URL.

Usage:

Firstly make a function in your .bash_profile to call the script

function url-encode()
{
    python ~/<path to script>/url_encode.py $@
}

Now simply call the script from your command line :)

$ url-encode "foo"
foo
$ url-encode --agressive "foo"
%66%6f%6f
$ echo "foo" | url-encode
foo
$ echo "foo" | url-encode --agressive
%66%6f%6f

url_encode.py

#!/usr/bin/env python3
from argparse import ArgumentParser
from sys import stdin, stdout, argv
from urllib.parse import quote as url_encode


def aggressive_url_encode(string):
    return "".join("%{0:0>2}".format(format(ord(char), "x")) for char in string)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    parser = ArgumentParser()
    parser.add_argument("-a", "--agressive", help="Forcibly encode every character rather than non-url safe characters", action="store_true")
    parser.add_argument("string", nargs="*")
    args = parser.parse_args()

    if args.agressive:
        if args.string:
            stdout.write(aggressive_url_encode(" ".join(args.string)))
        else:
            stdout.write(aggressive_url_encode(stdin.read()[:-1]))
    else:
        if args.string:
            stdout.write(url_encode(" ".join(args.string)))
        else:
            stdout.write(url_encode(stdin.read()[:-1]))

NOTE, the aggressive encoding can be slightly simplified:

def aggressive_url_encode(string):
    return "".join("%{:02x}".format(ord(char)) for char in string)

we can embed the hex formatting in one format call