URLs and ampersands

[Steven D'Aprano]

I'm using urllib.urlretrieve() to download HTML pages, and I've hit a 
snag with URLs containing ampersands:

http://www.example.com/parrot.php?x=1&y=2

Somewhere in the process, urls like the above are escaped to:

http://www.example.com/parrot.php?x=1&y=2

which naturally fails to exist.

I could just do a string replace, but is there a "right" way to escape 
and unescape URLs? I've looked through the standard lib, but I can't find 
anything helpful.


-- 
Steven