Return to Revisions

Once you start storing some strings in percent-encoded form, you have the added burden of keeping track of which strings are encoded, and which strings aren't.¹ Therefore, you should avoid ad hoc escaping.

Instead, I recommend keeping all strings in unescaped form, and performing the escaping at the last minute when constructing the URL. That also forces you to use a URL-construction procedure that handles all escaping for you — the way it should be done. For example,

import urllib
start = (Time.now.utc + 3600).strftime(...)
end = (Time.now.utc + 7200).strftime(...)
query_string = urllib.urlencode({ 'start': start, 'end', end })

¹ One way to keep track of which variables contain encoded strings is to use some form of Hungarian Notation (see the section called The Real Solution).