[Python-Dev] xmlrpclib

[Bill Bumgarner]

On Thursday, Mar 6, 2003, at 11:50 US/Eastern, Skip Montanaro wrote:
>     Bill> Is there active work on the xmlrpclib module these days?  The
>     Bill> HTTPTransport patch/addition should likely go out with 2.3 
> as it
>     Bill> adds easy authentication and proxy support to xmlrpclib.
>
> Can you provide a SF id?  I can't seem to find it.

It had been closed or moved out of the SF bug queue by Fred about the 
same time he left python-dev, I believe.     I had sent the 
HTTPTransport source to Fred, but that sounds like a dead end these 
days.

Found it: 648658

>     Bill> Also, the unicode support in xmlrpclib is broken in that it 
> can't
>     Bill> handle subclasses of <type 'unicode'>.
>
> Does it handle subclasses of str?

I haven't tested, but looking at the implementation, I don't think it 
will.

In my case, I'm using xmlrpclib in the context of a Cocoa/Python based 
application that frequently uses Objective-C sourced strings as a part 
of the RPC request.  The PyObjC bridge now bridges NSStrings as a 
subclass of unicode.

Currently, the Marshaller class in xmlrpclib builds a simple dictionary 
of types used to encode raw objects to XML.

class Marshaller:
     ...
     dispatch = {}
     ...
     def dump_string(self, value, escape=escape):
         self.write("<value><string>%s</string></value>\n" % 
escape(value))
     dispatch[StringType] = dump_string
     if unicode:
         def dump_unicode(self, value, escape=escape):
             value = value.encode(self.encoding)
             self.write("<value><string>%s</string></value>\n" % 
escape(value))
         dispatch[UnicodeType] = dump_unicode
     ...

Where the dump method is:

     def __dump(self, value):
         try:
             f = self.dispatch[type(value)]
         except KeyError:
             raise TypeError, "cannot marshal %s objects" % type(value)
         else:
             f(self, value)

So, no, it doesn't do subclasses properly.  The workaround [for me] was 
easy... and bogus:

import xmlrpclib
Marshaller.dispatch[type(NSString.stringWithString_(''))] = 
Marshaller.dispatch[type(u'')]

b.bum