[docs] Update doc for the cgi module in version 3.2

Pierre Quentel pierre.quentel at gmail.com
Sun Jan 23 15:04:51 CET 2011


Hi,

I wrote a patch for the cgi module in version 3.2rc1. Small changes should
be done to the documentation of this module to reflect the changes in the
module API :

- in section "20.2.2. Using the cgi module"

original text :
"If a field represents an uploaded file, accessing the value via the value
attribute or the getvalue() method reads the entire file in memory as a
string. This may not be what you want. You can test for an uploaded file by
testing either the filename attribute or the file attribute. You can then
read the data at leisure from the file attribute:"

proposed new text (for files, value is bytes, not string, and the read()
method on file also returns bytes) :
"If a field represents an uploaded file, accessing the value via the value
attribute or the getvalue() method reads the entire file in memory as bytes.
This may not be what you want. You can test for an uploaded file by testing
either the filename attribute or the file attribute. You can then read the
data at leisure from the file attribute (the read() and readline() methods
will return bytes) :"

- version 2.1 introduced a parameter "encoding" for the FieldStorage
constructor, used to decode the bytes received on the HTTP connection for
fields other than files. This encoding must the one defined in the HTML
document holding the form submitted to the CGI script ; it is usually
defined by a meta tag :
<meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html;charset=latin-1">
or by the Content-Type header for this document

I'm not sure where this should be mentioned in the documentation. Maybe in
"20.2.9. Common problems and solutions" for the moment. But there are plans
to introduce another interface to change the encoding of sys.stdout in the
CGI script itself, so another option would be to open a specific section
about encodings

Hope it's clear enough
Pierre
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