[Python-Dev] urllib unicode handling

[Tom Pinckney]

Hi,

While trying to use urllib in python 2.5.1 to HTTP GET content from  
various web sites, I've run into a problem with urllib.quote  
(and .quote_plus): they don't accept unicode strings.

I see that this is an issue that has been discussed before:

	see this thread: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2006-July/067248.html
	especially this post: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2006-July/067335.html

While I don't really want to re-open a can of worms, it seems that the  
current implementation of urllib.quote and urllib.quote_plus is  
painfully incompatible with how the web (circa 2008) actually works.  
While the standards may say there is no official way to represent  
unicode strings in URLs, in practice the world uses UTF-8 quite  
heavily. For example, I found the following URLs in Google pretty  
quickly by looking for percent encoded utf-8 encoded accented e's.

	http://www.last.fm/music/Jos%C3%A9+Gonz%C3%A1lez
	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Fouch%C3%A9
	http://apps.facebook.com/ilike/artist/Jos%C3%A9+Gonz%C3%A1lez/track/Stay+In+The+Shade?apv=1

While in theory UTF-8 is not a standard, sites like Last.fm, Facebook  
and Wikipedia seem to have embraced it (as have pretty much all other  
major web sites). As with HTML, there is what the standard says and  
what the actual browsers have to accept in order to work in the real  
world.

urllib.urlencode already converts unicode characters to their UTF-8  
representation before percent encoding them. Why not urllib.quote and  
urllib.quote_plus?

Thanks for any thoughts on this,

Tom