Antoine Pitrou <solip...@pitrou.net> wrote: > Bill Janssen <janssen <at> parc.com> writes: > > > > This whole discussion seems a bit "rare and obscure" to me. I've built > > URLs for years without this method, and never felt the lack. What bugs me > > is the lack of a way to build multipart-formdata payloads, the only standard > > way to send non-Latin1 strings as part of a request. > > ?? What's the problem with sending non-Latin1 data without multipart-formdata?
I should have said, as values for a FORM submission. There are two ways to encode form values for a FORM submission, application/x-www-form-urlencoded, and multipart/form-data. As per http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/forms.html#h-17.13.4: ``The content type "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" is inefficient for sending large quantities of binary data or text containing non-ASCII characters. The content type "multipart/form-data" should be used for submitting forms that contain files, non-ASCII data, and binary data.'' And we don't support this in the http client-side standard library code. (Do we? Haven't looked lately.) The same section also says: ``Space characters are replaced by `+', and then reserved characters are escaped as described in [RFC1738], section 2.2: Non-alphanumeric characters are replaced by `%HH', a percent sign and two hexadecimal digits representing the ASCII code of the character. Line breaks are represented as "CR LF" pairs (i.e., `%0D%0A').'' That "the ASCII code of the character" seemingly restricts it to ASCII... But this is complicated by the fact that most browsers try to use the character set the server will understand, and the widely used technique to accomplish this is to use the same charset the page the FORM occurs in uses. Unless this is set explicitly, it defaults to Latin-1. I prefer to avoid all this uncertainty, and use a well-defined format when submitting a form, so I tend to use multipart/form-data, which allows explicit control over this. Bill _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
