Hi I have a website that is in Traditional Chinese and when I check the site statistics it tell me that the search term for the website is å%8f°å%8d%97 親å%90é¤%90廳 which obviously makes no sense to me. My question is what is this encoding called? And is there a way to use Python to decode this character string. Thank you.
It is called a mutt encoding; the underlying bytes have been mangled beyond their original meaning and they are no longer a real encoding.
It was once URL-quoted UTF-8, but now interpreted as latin-1 without unquoting those URL escapes. I was able to un-mangle this by interpreting it as such:
>>> from urllib2 import unquote
>>> bytesquoted = u'å%8f°å%8d%97 親å%90é¤%90廳'.encode('latin1')
>>> unquoted = unquote(bytesquoted)
>>> print unquoted.decode('utf8')
台南 親子餐廳