[Python-Dev] urllib.quote and unquote - Unicode issues

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Bill Janssen writes:

 > > A quoting function that accepts bytes *must* have an encoding
 > > argument.
 > 
 > Huh?  What would it use it for?

Ah, you're right.  I was thinking in terms of an URI builder, where the
quoter would do any required conversion (eg, if the bytes represented
a string in Japanese) to another (possibly scheme-mandated) encoding
(typically UTF-8).  But that doesn't really make sense; the URI
builder should know what to do, and that's a better place to do such
conversions.