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

Bill Janssen janssen at parc.com
Wed Jul 30 19:33:51 CEST 2008

It looks like all other APIs in the Py3k version of urllib treat URLs as text.

The URL is text, a string of ASCII characters. We're just talking about urllib.quote() and urllib.unquote(), which are there to support the text-ization of binary values, and the de-text-ization.

I think that would break too much code, without a good way to automatically fix it.

You'd rather break Python? Somehow I don't think so.

Here's the signature I'm proposing:

quote() -- takes string or bytes, and produces string.

 If input is a string, looks to optional "encoding" parameter to
 determine character set encoding to use to transform it to byte before
 quoting it.  If "encoding" is not specified, defaults to UTF-8.

unquote() -- takes string, produces bytes or string

 If optional "encoding" parameter is specified, decodes bytes with
 that encoding and returns string.  Otherwise, returns bytes.

Bill

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