[Python-Dev] Supporting raw bytes data in urllib.parse.* (was Re: Polymorphic best practices)

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Nick Coghlan writes:

 > (Basically, while the issue of programmers assuming 'latin-1' or
 > 'utf-8' or similar ASCII friendly encodings when they shouldn't is
 > real, I don't believe a polymorphic API here will make things any
 > *worse* than what would happen with a parallel API)

That depends on how far the polymorphic API goes.  As long as the
polymorphic API *never ever* does anything that involves decoding wire
format (and I include URL-quoting here), the programmer will have to
explicitly do some decoding to get into much trouble, and at that
point it's really their problem; you can't stop them.

But I don't know whether the web apps programmers will be satisfied
with such a minimal API.  If not, you're going to have to make some
delicate judgments about what to provide and what not, and whether/how
to provide a safety net of some kind.  I don't envy you that task.

 > And if this turns out to be a disaster in practice:

I would say be conservative about which APIs you make polymorphic.

And there are a lot of APIs that probably should be considered
candidates for polymorphic versions (regexp matching and searching,
for example).  So any experience or generic functionality you develop
here is likely to benefit somebody down the road.