[Python-Dev] Should ftplib use UTF-8 instead of latin-1 encoding? (original) (raw)

Brett Cannon bcannon at gmail.com
Fri Jan 23 19:15:18 CET 2009

On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 00:31, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:

Giampaolo Rodola' wrote:

Hi, while attempting to port pyftpdlib [1] to Python 3 I have noticed that ftplib differs from the previous 2.x version in that it uses latin-1 to encode everything it's sent over the FTP command channel, but by reading RFC-2640 [2] it seems that UTF-8 should be preferred instead. I'm far from being an expert of encodings, plus the RFC is quite hard to understand, so sorry in advance if I have misunderstood the whole thing. I read it that a conforming client MUST issue a FEAT command, to determine whether the server supports UTF8. One would have to go back to the original FTP RFC, but it seams that, in the absence of server UTF8 support, all path names must be 7-bit clean (which means that ASCII should be the default encoding). In any case, Brett changed the encoding to latin1 in r58378, maybe he can comment.

If I remember correctly something along Martin's comment about 7-bit clean is needed, but some servers don't follow the standard, so I swapped it to Latin-1. But that was so long ago I don't remember where I gleaned the details from in the RFC. If I misread the RFC and it is UTF-8 then all the better to make more of the world move over to Unicode.

-Brett

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