On 9/7/2010 3:02 PM, John Nagle wrote:
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.
You may report 2.7 bugs, but please verify that the behavior is a bug in
2.7. However, bugs that have been fixed by the switch to switch to
unicode for text are unlikely to be fixed a second time in 2.7. You
might suggest an enhancement to the doc for urlencode if that workaround
is not clear. Or perhaps that workaround suggests that in this case, a
fix would not be too difficult, and you can supply a patch.
The basic deployment problem is that people who want to use unicode text
also want to use libraries that have not been ported to use unicode
text. That is the major issue for many porting projects.
--
Terry Jan Reedy
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