How to Encrypt a URL in Python

Encryption has become an integral topic in modern computing, with a surge in its importance due to the far-reaching implications of cyber security. In our tutorial today, we are going to discuss how to encrypt a URL in Python.

Python, a high-level programming language, is widely recognized for its easy readability and simplicity when it comes to coding. Among the numerous tasks it can handle, encrypting and decrypting URLs is one of them. With proper Python libraries, you can easily perform URL encryption.

Step 1: Installing Necessary Modules

Firstly, we need to install the necessary Python libraries. For this tutorial, we will need Python’s built-in libraries: urllib.parse and base64.

Here is a simple instruction to import these modules in Python:

1 2	import urllib.parse import base64

Step 2: Encrypting the URL

To encrypt the URL, we use Python’s base64.b64encode() function from the base64 module. After encoding with base64, we further encode it using URL encoding to ensure that it can be used safely within a URL. Below is an example of how you can do this:

def encrypt_url(url):

url_bytes = url.encode('ascii')

base64_bytes = base64.b64encode(url_bytes)

base64_url = base64_bytes.decode('ascii')

return urllib.parse.quote(base64_url)

Step 3: Decrypting the URL

The decryption of the URL also involves steps: URL decoding and base64 decoding. We will use Python’s urllib.parse.unquote() function for URL decoding and base64.b64decode() function for base64 decoding:

def decrypt_url(encoded_url):

base64_url = urllib.parse.unquote(encoded_url)

base64_bytes = base64_url.encode('ascii')

url_bytes = base64.b64decode(base64_bytes)

url = url_bytes.decode('ascii')

return url

Step 4: Testing our Encryption and Decryption Functions

To test these functions, we simply call them with a suitable URL such as ‘https://www.example.com’:

url = 'https://www.example.com'

encrypted = encrypt_url(url)

print('Encrypted:', encrypted)

decrypted = decrypt_url(encrypted)

print('Decrypted:', decrypted)

The Full Code:

import urllib.parse

import base64