[New-bugs-announce] [issue25955] email.utils.formataddr does not support RFC 6532

[Sergei Maertens]

New submission from Sergei Maertens:

The function `formataddr` in stdlib `email.utils` does not allow unicode e-mail addresses where the first part (before the @) is unicode. Python 3.5 promises support for SMTPUTF8 through `EmailPoliy.utf8` (https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.5.html#email), but this utility function doesn't respect this, as it calls `address.encode('ascii')`.

For unicode addresses, an obvious `UnicodeEncodeError` is raised.

Reproduce steps:

➜  ~  python
Python 3.5.1 (default, Dec  7 2015, 12:58:09) 
[GCC 5.2.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from email.utils import formataddr
>>> formataddr(('dummy', 'juan.lópez at abc.com'))
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python3.5/email/utils.py", line 91, in formataddr
    address.encode('ascii')
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\xf3' in position 6: ordinal not in range(128)

Interesting is that on Python 2.7 the behaviour is more naive, but it works::

➜  ~  python2
Python 2.7.11 (default, Dec  6 2015, 15:43:46) 
[GCC 5.2.0] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from email.utils import formataddr
>>> formataddr(('dummy', u'juan.lópez at abc.com'))
u'dummy <juan.l\xf3pez at abc.com>'

----------
components: email
messages: 257034
nosy: Sergei Maertens, barry, r.david.murray
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: email.utils.formataddr does not support RFC 6532
type: enhancement
versions: Python 3.5

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue25955>
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