[Python-Dev] http.client: Determining Content-Length

[Cory Benfield]

On 31 March 2015 at 17:55, Demian Brecht <demianbrecht at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm not sure whether this should be python-list or here, but given it's a premature code review for http.client, I figured I'd post here first.
>
> I'm in the process of adding support for chunked transfer encoding to http.client (issue #12319). One of the bits of functionality that I'm working on in is ironing out some of the kinks out in determining the content length of the request bodies. Given the number of data types allowed as bodies it does get a little messy, so I wanted to get some feedback here and see if anyone can shoot holes through it prior to updating the current patch. The tests are passing, but there may be use cases not accounted for in the new implementation.
>
> https://gist.github.com/demianbrecht/f94be5a51e32bb9c81e1
>
> The above is intended to replace _set_content_length (current state of the patch can be seen here: http://bugs.python.org/review/12319/diff/14331/Lib/http/client.py). There is a comprehensive list of data types currently supported can be found here: http://bugs.python.org/issue23740. Comments and feedback are much appreciated.

Nothing problematic leaps out at me here, but only if I look at your
proposal in the context of the full patch.

Your full patch does seem to have an edge case: for HTTP/1.1, if I
pass a generator and no content-length you'll blow up by indexing into
it. That's probably fine (your only option in this case would be to
frame this request by half-closing the TCP stream, which I seem to
recall you ruling out elsewhere), but you might want to wrap the
exception in something more helpful: not sure.

Cory