[Python-Dev] urllib.quote and unquote - Unicode issues (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Wed Aug 6 23:44:35 CEST 2008

On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 9:09 AM, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:

Nobody's been assigned to look at it and it hasn't been given a priority, even though we all agree it's a bug (though we disagree on how to fix it). This I can explain (I think). Nobody is assigned to look: we usually don't do assignments of bugs or patches, except when there is a specific maintainer for the code in question. urllib has no maintainer.

I'm somehow strangely attracted to this issue, and have posted a bit of a code review.

It hasn't been given priority: There are currently 606 patches in the tracker, many fixing bugs of some sort. It's not clear (to me, at least) why this should be given priority over all the other things such as interpreter crashes.

Well, it's an API change, and those are impossible after beta3 is released (or at least have to wait for 3.1).

We all agree it's a bug: no, I don't. I think it's a missing feature, at best, but I'm staying out of the discussion. As-is, urllib only supports ASCII in URLs, and that is fine for most purposes. URLs are just not made for non-ASCII characters. Implement IRIs if you want non-ASCII characters; the rules are much clearer for these.

The wikipedia use of urlencoded UTF-8 (and other examples) suggest that whether we like it or not the trend is towards this. I'd like to support such usage rather than fight it (standards or no standards).

As it stands, a committer would have - to agree it's an important problem - to agree the patch is correct - to judge it is not a new feature, as we are in beta already - implicitly accept maintenance of that change, and take all the blame that it might produce in the coming years

It could be a small enough new feature. Also note that for urls that only use ASCII there is no behavior change. (And certainly this is an important use case, e.g. to encode occurrences of + or & in query strings).

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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