[Python-Dev] Can the cgi module be made Unicode-aware? (original) (raw)

Martin v. Loewis martin@v.loewis.de
11 Apr 2002 18:26:55 +0200

Skip Montanaro <skip@pobox.com> writes:

I did some reading before nodding off last night. The tag takes an optional "accept-charset" attribute, which can be a list.

No, it doesn't - that's a proprietary extension. Or, maybe I'm missing something: where did you find a statement that this is "official" in any sense?

As far as I can tell, the underlying data encoding of the form's data is generally going to be implicit.

Unfortunately. RFC 1867 specifies that browsers should use a Content-Type in a multipart/form-data message, but none of the current browsers does.

Adding an "accept-charset" attribute to the does appear to have some effect on Content-Type in some instances, but not in all.

It might depend on the browser, since it's proprietary.

The cgi programmer can't rely on charset information coming from the browser and will need a way to tell the cgi module what the charset of the incoming data is. I think FieldStorage and MiniFieldStorage need optional charset parameters and I think the charset needs to be used from the Content-Type header, if present.

Of course, if you also have uploaded files, this cannot work: the file data never follow the encoding - only the "text" fields do.

Regards, Martin