urllib3 is a powerful, user-friendly HTTP client for Python. However, urllib3 does not provide built-in support for Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) directly within the library. IDNs are domain names that include characters outside of the ASCII set, which are used to allow domain names in non-Latin scripts like Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, etc.
To work with IDNs, you typically need to convert them to Punycode, which is an ASCII representation of Unicode strings used for the purpose of hostnames. The Python standard library's encodings.idna module can be used to convert a Unicode domain name to Punycode, which can then be used with urllib3.
Here is an example of how you could use urllib3 with an IDN by converting it to Punycode first:
import urllib3
from encodings import idna
# An international domain name
unicode_domain = 'münchen.de'
# Convert the Unicode domain to Punycode
punycode_domain = idna.ToASCII(unicode_domain).decode('ascii')
# Now you can use urllib3 with the Punycode version of the domain
http = urllib3.PoolManager()
response = http.request('GET', f'http://{punycode_domain}/')
print(response.status)
print(response.data)
In this code snippet, we first import the necessary libraries and then convert the international domain name to its Punycode equivalent using the idna module. After the conversion, we can create a PoolManager instance from urllib3 and issue an HTTP request using the Punycode domain.
Keep in mind that the conversion to Punycode isn't required for the path or query components of a URL; it's only necessary for the domain name part. Also, consider that when dealing with web scraping or any form of automated HTTP requests, you should always respect the website's robots.txt file, terms of service, and any applicable laws or regulations.
