[Python-Dev] PEP 3333: wsgi_string() function

[Robert Brewer]

P.J. Eby wrote:
> At 09:43 AM 1/7/2011 -0500, James Y Knight wrote:
> >On Jan 7, 2011, at 6:51 AM, Victor Stinner wrote:
> > > I don't understand why you are attached to this horrible hack
> > > (bytes-in-unicode). It introduces more work and more confusing
than
> > > using raw bytes unchanged.
> > >
> > > It doesn't work and so something has to be changed.
> >
> >It's gross but it does work. This has been discussed ad-nausium on
> >web-sig over a period of years.
> >
> >I'd like to reiterate that it is only even a potential issue for the
> >PATH_INFO/SCRIPT_NAME keys. Those two keys are required to have been
> >urldecoded already, into byte-data in some encoding. For all the
> >other keys (including the ones from os.environ), they are either
> >*properly* decoded in 8859-1 or are just ascii (possibly still
> >urlencoded, so the app needs to urldecode and decode into a string
> >with the correct encoding).
> 
> Right.  Also, it should be mentioned that none of this would be
> necessary if we could've gotten a "bytes of a known encoding"
> type.  If you look back to the last big Python-Dev discussion on
> bytes/unicode and stdlib API breakage, this was the holdup for
> getting a sane WSGI spec.
> 
> Since we couldn't change the language to fix the problem (due to the
> moratorium), we had to use this less-pleasant way of dealing with
> things, in order to get a final WSGI spec for Python 3.
> 
> (If anybody is wondering about the specifics of the language change
> that was needed, it'd be having a "bytes with known encoding" type,
> that when combined in any polymorphic operation with a unicode
> string, would result in bytes-with-encoding output, and would raise
> an error if the resulting value could not be encoded in the target
> encoding.  Then we would simply do all WSGI header operations with
> this type, using latin-1 as the target encoding.)

Still looking forward to the day when that moratorium is lifted. Anyone
have any idea when that will be?


Bob