On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 2:41 PM, Manlio Perillo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > James Y Knight ha scritto: >> You seem to be under the mistaken impression that form post content is >> MIME. It is not. It looks kinda like it should be, and maybe it's even >> specified to be [rfc2388], but actually treating it as MIME is a rather >> critical error. RFC2388 is just wrong, don't believe a thing it says.
In what way is RFC 2388 wrong or not MIME? Per RFC 2388 sect. 3: "The media-type multipart/form-data follows the rules of all multipart MIME data streams as outlined in [RFC 2046]." So it is MIME, right? You may be referring to the much older "experimental" RFC 1867, upon which 2388 is based. It merely said it was a "MIME compatible representation". But even then the intent was clearly to be MIME. Now you can successfully argue that many user agents do not follow the RFC carefully enough. But that's not a problem with the RFC itself. > But, at this point, can one consider the content of form post to be encoded > "text" string? > > Or it should be considered encoded "byte" string? Both/either. I'd say follow the RFC, but perhaps allow a caller to provide an override default. So yes, you should assume an encoded string if the subpart has a text/* Content-Type, or if it has no content type at all (which must then be assumed to be text/plain US-ASCII). That is the intent of the MIME text/* media type after all; that it should be interpreted as a character string and not a byte string. In other cases, I would say returning a byte string is the correct thing to do. Also I'd say that if you're dealing with text (text/*) and no charset is provided (or the caller hasn't given an override default charset); then you must assume US-ASCII. And you should allow any UnicodeDecodeErrors to bubble up to the caller. In other words if a user agent sent text in ISO-8859-x and didn't say it was doing so, then an error should be raised when non-ASCII data is seen. -- Deron Meranda _______________________________________________ Web-SIG mailing list Web-SIG@python.org Web SIG: http://www.python.org/sigs/web-sig Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/web-sig/archive%40mail-archive.com
