[Web-SIG] Request for Comments on upcoming WSGI Changes

[Philip Jenvey]

On Sep 22, 2009, at 2:28 AM, Armin Ronacher wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Alan Kennedy schrieb:
>> 2. Give the programmer (possibly mojibake) unicode strings in the  
>> WSGI
>> environ anyway
>> 3. And let them solve their problems themselves, using server
>> configuration or bespoke middleware
> Because that problem was solved a long ago in applications themselves.
> Webob, Werkzeug, Paste, Pylons, Django, you name it, all are operating
> on unicode.  And the way they do that is straightforward.

Werkzeug/WebOb/Paste all seem to have standardized on: return unicode,  
lazily decoded via a default encoding which can be overridden by the  
app via some API.

The Java servlet spec actually defines a  
ServletRequest.setCharacterEncoding(String enc) method, which lets the  
app override the encoding of the body/params (though not the URL on  
some containers), as long it's done before the body is read. Pretty  
much what said Python wrappers are doing.

> Now currently what we have to do on Python 3 is to encode the data  
> again
> and decode it with the target charset.  Unnecessary roundtrips that  
> just
> slow the whole thing down.  What for?

Because our request container is a plain, pre-fabricated dict that  
doesn't permit the lazy behavior.

--
Philip Jenvey