Unable to parse Non ASCII URL on Python? - python-2.7

Question

I wanted to query Freebase API to get the list of teams José Mourinho has played for.
So, the URL i used on my browser is
https://www.googleapis.com/freebase/v1/mqlread?query=[{"name": "José Mourinho","/sports/pro_athlete/teams": [{"mid": null,"team": null,"to": null,"optional": true}]}]
However,
import json
import urllib
service_url="https://www.googleapis.com/freebase/v1/mqlread"
query = '[{"name": "' + "José Mourinho" + '","/sports/pro_athlete/teams": [{"mid": null,"team": null,"to": null,"optional": true}]}]'
url = service_url + '?' + 'query='+query
response = json.loads(urllib.urlopen(url).read())
Gives me an error saying,
UnicodeError: URL u'https://www.googleapis.com/freebase/v1/mqlread?query=[{"name": "Jos\xe9 Mourinho","/sports/pro_athlete/teams": [{"mid": null,"team": null,"to": null,"optional": true}]}]' contains non-ASCII characters
What is the solution to this?

Answer 1

I think you skipped over a little bit of the docs. Try this instead:
# coding=UTF-8
import json
import urllib
service_url = "https://www.googleapis.com/freebase/v1/mqlread"
query = [{
'/sports/pro_athlete/teams': [
{
'to': None,
'optional': True,
'mid': None,
'team': None
}
],
'name': 'José Mourinho'
}]
url = service_url + '?' + urllib.urlencode({'query': json.dumps(query)})
response = json.loads(urllib.urlopen(url).read())
print response
Rather than building the query string yourself, use json.dumps and urllib.urlencode to create it for you. They're good at this.
Note: if you can use the requests package, that last bit could be:
import requests
response = requests.get(service_url, params={'query': json.dumps(query)})
Then you get to skip the URL construction and escaping altogether!