[Python-Dev] [Python-ideas] Proposed addtion to urllib.parse in 3.1 (and urlparse in 2.7) (original) (raw)

Bill Janssen janssen at parc.com
Mon Apr 20 05:41:23 CEST 2009

Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

Bill Janssen <janssen parc.com> writes: > > ``The content type "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" is inefficient > for sending large quantities of binary data or text containing non-ASCII > characters.

The fact that it's "inefficient" (i.e. takes more bytes than an optimal encoding scheme would) doesn't mean that it doesn't work.

Absolutely. I'm just quoting the spec to you. In any case, being able to send multipart/form-data would be a nice thing to have, if only for file uploads.

Look out there, many Web pages specify a different character set than Latin-1... UTF8 is quite a common choice in the modern world.

Sure. But nowhere does a spec say that this page charset should be used in sending the values of a FORM using application/x-www-form-urlencoded in a new HTTP request. It's just a convention some browsers use.

Also, browsers will encode those characters that cannot be encoded in the character set using HTML escapes ("&1234;"). This means you can enter any

Sure, some browsers will. Others will apparently replace them with question marks. It's undefined.

unicode text into any form, regardless of the encoding of the source page. It's up to the Web application to decode the text, sure, but any decent Web framework or toolkit should do it for you.

Bill

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