[Python-Dev] urllib.quote and unicode bug resuscitation attempt

[Stefan Rank]

on 13.07.2006 10:26 Mike Brown said the following:
> Stefan Rank wrote:
>> on 12.07.2006 07:53 Martin v. Löwis said the following:
>>> Anthony Baxter wrote:
>>>>> The right thing to do is IRIs. 
>>>> For 2.5, should we at least detect that it's unicode and raise a 
>>>> useful error?
>>> That can certainly be done, sure.

<snip>

> Put me down as +1 on raising a useful error instead of a KeyError or whatever,
> and +1 on having an irilib, but -1 on working toward accepting unicode in the
> URI-oriented urllib.quote(), because

<snip convincing explanation>

> See, right now, quote('abc 123%') returns 'abc%20123%25', as you would expect. 
> Similarly, everyone would probably expect u'abc 123%' to return
> u'abc%20123%25', and if we were to implement that, there'd probably be no harm 
> done.

Well, originally, I would have expected it to return a byte str(ing),
BUT
I am now converted and think it is best to raise a TypeError for 
unicode, and leave the encoding decisions to higher level code.

So I'll repeat the "patch" #1, slightly modified::

  if isinstance(s, unicode):
      raise TypeError("quote expects an encoded byte string as argument")

Is it safe to assume that code that breaks because of this change was 
already broken?

stefan