') -> 'abc%20def' Each part of a URL, e.g. the path info, the query, etc., has a different set of reserved characters that must be quoted. The quote function offers a cautious (not minimal) way to quote a string for most of these parts. RFC 3986 Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax lists the following (un)reserved characters. unreserved = ALPHA / DIGIT / "-" / "." / "_" / "~" reserved = gen-delims / sub-delims gen-delims = ":" / "/" / "?" / "#" / "[" / "]" / "@" sub-delims = "!" / "$" / "&" / "'" / "(" / ")" / "*" / "+" / "," / ";" / "=" Each of the reserved characters is reserved in some component of a URL, but not necessarily in all of them. The quote function %-escapes all characters that are neither in the unreserved chars ("always safe") nor the additional chars set via the safe arg. The default for the safe arg is '/'. The character is reserved, but in typical usage the quote function is being called on a path where the existing slash characters are to be preserved. Python 3.7 updates from using RFC 2396 to RFC 3986 to quote URL strings. Now, "~" is included in the set of unreserved characters. string and safe may be either str or bytes objects. encoding and errors must not be specified if string is a bytes object. The optional encoding and errors parameters specify how to deal with non-ASCII characters, as accepted by the str.encode method. By default, encoding='utf-8' (characters are encoded with UTF-8), and errors='strict' (unsupported characters raise a UnicodeEncodeError). rŮ