[Python-Dev] Supporting raw bytes data in urllib.parse.* (was Re: Polymorphic best practices) (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Tue Sep 21 23:33:19 CEST 2010

On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 1:10 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:

Nick Coghlan writes:

 > (Basically, while the issue of programmers assuming 'latin-1' or  > 'utf-8' or similar ASCII friendly encodings when they shouldn't is  > real, I don't believe a polymorphic API here will make things any  > worse than what would happen with a parallel API) That depends on how far the polymorphic API goes.  As long as the polymorphic API never ever does anything that involves decoding wire format (and I include URL-quoting here), the programmer will have to explicitly do some decoding to get into much trouble, and at that point it's really their problem; you can't stop them. But I don't know whether the web apps programmers will be satisfied with such a minimal API.  If not, you're going to have to make some delicate judgments about what to provide and what not, and whether/how to provide a safety net of some kind.  I don't envy you that task.

As Chris pointed out, Issue 3300 means that particular boat has already sailed where quote/unquote are concerned. Those are the only APIs which ever need to do any encoding or decoding, as they deal with percent-encoding of Unicode characters.

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia

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