It would be lovely if we could allow WSGI applications to reliably
accept Unicode paths.
That is to say, allow WSGI apps to have beautiful URLs like Wikipedia's,
without requiring URL-rewriting magic. (Which is so highly
server-specific, potentially unavailable to non-admin webmasters, and
makes WSGI app deployment more difficult than it already is.)
If we could reliably read the bytes the browser sends to us in the GET
request that would be great, we could just decode those and be done with
it. Unfortunately, that's not reliable, because:
1. thanks to an old wart in the CGI specification, %XX hex escapes are
decoded before the character is put into the PATH_INFO environment variable;
2. the environment variables may be stored as Unicode.
(1) on its own gives us the problem of not being able to distinguish a
path-separator slash from an encoded %2F; a long-known problem but not
one that greatly affects most people.
But combined with (2) that means some other component must choose how to
decode the bytes into Unicode characters. No standard currently
specifies what encoding to use, it is not typically configuarable, and
it's certainly not within reach of the WSGI application. My assumption
is that most applications will want to end up with UTF-8-encoded URLs;
other choices are certainly possible but as we move towards IRI they
become less likely.
This situation previously affected only Windows users, because NT
environment variables are native Unicode. However, Python 3.0 specifies
all environment variable access is through a Unicode wrapper, and gives
no way to control how that automatic decoding is done, leaving everyone
in the same boat.
WSGI Amendments_1.0 includes a suggestion for Python 3.0 that environ
should be "decoded from the headers using HTTP standard encodings (i.e.
latin-1 + RFC 2047)", but unfortunately this doesn't quite work:
1. for many existing environments the decoding-from-headers charset is
out of reach of the WSGI server/layer and may well not be ISO-8859-1.
Even wsgiref doesn't currently use 8859-1 (see below).
2. RFC2047 is not applicable to HTTP headers, which are not really
822-family headers even though they look just like them. The sub-headers
in eg. a multipart/form-data chunk *are* (probably) proper 822 headers
so RFC2047 could apply, but those headers are already dealt with by the
application or framework, not WSGI. HTTP 1.1 (RFC2616) does refer to
RFC2047 as an encoding mechanism for TEXT and quoted-string, but this
makes no sense as 2047 itself requires embedding in atom-based parsing
sequences which those productions are not (quoted-strings are explicitly
disallowed by 2047 itself). In any case no existing browser attempts to
support RFC2047 encoding rules for any possible interpretation of what
2616 might mean.
Something like Luís Bruno's ORIGINAL_PATH_INFO proposal
(http://mail.python.org/pipermail/web-sig/2008-January/003124.html)
would be worth looking at for this IMO. It may be of questionable
usefulness if the only character affected is the slash, but it also
happens to solve the Unicode problem. Obviously whatever it was called
it would have to be an optional additional value in the WSGI environ, as
pure CGI servers wouldn't be able to supply it. Conceivably it might
also be possible to have a standardised mod_rewrite rule to make the
variable also available to Apache CGI scripts, but still this is far
from global availability.
In the meantime I've been looking at how various combinations of servers
deal with this issue, and in what circumstances an application or
middleware can safely recover all possible Unicode input. 'Apache'
refers to the (AFAICT-identical) behaviour of both mod_cgi and mod_wsgi;
'IIS' refers to IIS with CGI.
*** Apache/Posix/Python2
OK.
No problem here, it's byte-based all the way through.
*** Apache/Posix/Python3:
Dependent on the default encoding.
Apache puts bytes into the envvars but Python takes them out as unicode.
If the system default encoding happens to be the same as the encoding
the WSGI application wanted we will be OK. Normally the app will want
UTF-8; many Linux distributions do use UTF-8 as the default system
encoding but there are plenty of distros (eg. Debian) and other Unixen
that do not. In any case we are getting a nasty system dependency at
deploy time that many webmasters will not be able to resolve.
It is sometimes possible to recover mangled characters despite the wrong
decoding having been applied. For example if the system encoding was
ISO-8859-1 or another encoding that maps every byte to a unique Unicode
character, we can encode the Unicode string back to its original bytes,
and thence apply the decoding we actually wanted! If, on the other hand,
it's something like ISO-8859-4, where not all high bytes are mapped at
all, we'll be losing random characters... not good.
*** Apache/NT/Python2
Always unrecoverable data loss.
Apache on Windows always uses ISO-8859-1 to decode the request path and
put it in the Unicode envvars. This is OK so far, we have Unicode
characters with the same codepoints as the original bytes. However,
Python2 needs to make the envvars available as bytes. It uses the system
default encoding; if that were ISO-8859-1, we'd be OK.
But it never is. Western European on NT is actually cp1252, whose
characters in the range 0x80 to 0x9F differ from ISO-8859-1. And if the
app wants UTF-8, chances are those characters are going to come up a
lot. There is as far as I know no user-selectable Windows codepage that
can map all the Unicode characters up to U+00FF.
*** Apache/NT/Python3
Wrong, but always recoverable.
Python retreives the bytes-encoded-into-Unicode-codepoints string
directly from the envvars. If the encoding should have been UTF-8 or
something else other than ISO-8859-1, we can recover the original bytes
by re-encoding to 8859-1, then decoding using the real charset.
*** IIS/NT/Python2
Mostly unrecoverable data loss.
IIS decodes submitted bytes to Unicode using UTF-8 when it can. But if
there is an invalid UTF-8 sequence in the bytes it will try again using
the system codepage. Python will then re-encode the Unicode envvar using
the system codepage.
If the app is expecting UTF-8 we can decode what Python gives us using
the system codepage (ie. 'mbcs') and get back any of the submitted
characters that happened to be in this server's system codepage. Other
characters may be replaced by question marks or Windows's best attempts
to give us something useful, which at best may be a character shorn of
diacriticals and at worst something just completely wrong.
NT's system codepage is never UTF-8, it is not a user-selectable option
never mind the default. We can improve our chances of getting more
characters through by using a character set with a wide repertoire, such
as cp932 (Shift-JIS). But it's still not really proper Unicode support.
If the app is expecting something non-UTF-8 there's not much hope. Even
if it wanted the same character set as the system codepage, it can't be
sure that the submitted bytes didn't happen to also be a valid UTF-8
sequence, and thus get mangled by IIS decoding them that way.
*** IIS/NT/Python3
OK, as long as the app wants UTF-8.
Incoming UTF-8 bytes are reliably converted to Unicode strings by IIS,
and directly read by Python from the envvars.
If the application didn't want UTF-8 the situation is about as hopeless
as with Python2.
*** wsgiref.simple_server/(any)/Python2
OK.
Bytes all the way through.
*** wsgiref.simple_server/(any)/Python3:
Probably will be OK, as long as the app wants UTF-8.
simple_server is currently broken in rc2. However judging by the code,
it is using urllib.parse.unquote, which assumes UTF-8, so it'll be fine
for apps that want UTF-8 and hopeless for those that don't.
I'd be very interested to hear what other servers are doing in this
situation - nginx? cherrypy's one? - and wonder if any particular
behaviour should be 'blessed'.
--
And Clover
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.doxdesk.com/
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