Agressive URL encode

agressive-url-encode.md

Agressive URL encode

Python based CLI tool to agressively url-encode strings, rather than just encoding non-url characters this tool will encode every character in the URL.

Usage:

Firstly make a function in your .bash_profile to call the script

function url-encode()
{
    python ~/<path to script>/url_encode.py $@
}

Now simply call the script from your command line :)

$ url-encode "foo"
foo
$ url-encode --agressive "foo"
%66%6f%6f
$ echo "foo" | url-encode
foo
$ echo "foo" | url-encode --agressive
%66%6f%6f

url_encode.py

#!/usr/bin/env python3
from argparse import ArgumentParser
from sys import stdin, stdout, argv
from urllib.parse import quote as url_encode


def aggressive_url_encode(string):
    return "".join("%{0:0>2}".format(format(ord(char), "x")) for char in string)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    parser = ArgumentParser()
    parser.add_argument("-a", "--agressive", help="Forcibly encode every character rather than non-url safe characters", action="store_true")
    parser.add_argument("string", nargs="*")
    args = parser.parse_args()

    if args.agressive:
        if args.string:
            stdout.write(aggressive_url_encode(" ".join(args.string)))
        else:
            stdout.write(aggressive_url_encode(stdin.read()[:-1]))
    else:
        if args.string:
            stdout.write(url_encode(" ".join(args.string)))
        else:
            stdout.write(url_encode(stdin.read()[:-1]))

Thanks for this. I write this comment to explain the star that was there and which I removed - I usually use stars as bookmarks. Once I implemented functionality I needed I removed it, but my gratitude remains.

Thank you for the gist. This is super helpful to encode SQL injections and other web attacks.

NOTE, the aggressive encoding can be slightly simplified:

def aggressive_url_encode(string):
    return "".join("%{:02x}".format(ord(char)) for char in string)

we can embed the hex formatting in one format call