Hi,

I'm wondering if anyone has ideas for how to deal with a "Header names must be 
latin1 string" AssertionError from WebTest that occurs when Pyramid apps are 
run in Python 2 with `from __future__ import unicode_literals`? Or what people 
think of my tween-based workaround below?


## Problem

We're in the process of migrating our Pyramid app from Python 2 to 3, and added 
`from __future__ import unicode_literals` to all our Python files, and this 
caused the following error from WebTest in Python 2:

AssertionError: Header names must be latin1 string (not Py2 unicode or Py3 
bytes type).

Here's a full traceback in case anyone's interested, though I don't think it's 
very enlightening: 
https://gist.github.com/seanh/1e8bee4476eca4d7f29e4c8d62f01171

The AssertionError is raised whenever your app sets any response header. For 
example this line would trigger it:

response.headers["Access-Control-Allow-Origin"] = "*"

Since we have `unicode_literals` those string literals are unicode strings in 
Python 2, whereas before `unicode_literals` they would have been byte strings, 
that's why adding `unicode_literals` triggered the AssertionError from WebTest.

In Python 3 no error occurs.

The reason WebTest has this AssertionError is that 
https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3333 requires HTTP response headers to be 
native strings - byte strings in Python 2 and unicode strings in Python 3. 
Here's the WebTest issue and pull request that added the assert:

https://github.com/Pylons/webtest/issues/119
https://github.com/Pylons/webtest/pull/180


## Workarounds

b-prefixing the strings like response.headers[b"Access-Control-Allow-Origin"] = 
b"*" would get rid of the AssertionError in Python 2 but cause the error to 
appear if the tests were run in Python 3.

Wrapping the strings in str() like 
response.headers[str("Access-Control-Allow-Origin")] = str("*") will fix it in 
both Python 2 and 3, but requires you to find and str()-wrap every response 
header string throughout your app.

Adding a tween that str()-wraps all response headers seems to be a good fix:

def encode_headers_tween_factory(handler, registry):
    def encode_headers_tween(request):
        resp = handler(request)
        for key in resp.headers.keys():
            values = resp.headers.getall(key)
            del resp.headers[key]
            for value in values:
                resp.headers.add(str(key), str(value))
        return resp
    return encode_headers_tween

config.add_tween('h.tweens.encode_headers_tween_factory')

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