There's a bug in Python 2.6's "urllib.urlencode". If you pass
in a Unicode character outside the ASCII range, instead of it
being encoded properly, an exception is raised.
File "C:\python26\lib\urllib.py", line 1267, in urlencode
v = quote_plus(str(v))
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa9' in
position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
This will probably work in 3.x, because there, "str" converts
to Unicode, and quote_plus can handle Unicode. This is one of
those legacy bugs left from the pre-Unicode era.
There's a workaround. Call urllib.urlencode with a second
parameter of 1. This turns on the optional feature of
accepting tuples in the argument to be encoded, and the
code goes through a newer code path that works.
Is it worth reporting 2.x bugs any more? Or are we in the
version suckage period, where version N is abandonware and
version N+1 isn't deployable yet.
John Nagle
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