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So this looks like its going to instantly create bugs in programs that use it. HTTP/1.1 headers are one of:
latin1
MIME encoded (RFC2047)
invalid and working only by accident
HTTP/2 doesn't change this.
An API that encourages folk to encode into utf8 and then put that in their headers is problematic.
Consider:
 def dump_wsgistr(data, encoding, errors='strict'):
 data.encode(encoding, errors).decode('iso-8859-1')
This takes a string that one wants to put into a header value, encodes it with a *user specified encoding*, then decodes that into iso-8859-1 [at which point it can be encoded back to octets by the wsgi server before putting on the wire].
But this is fundamentally wrong in the common case: either 'data' is itself suitable as a header value (e.g. it is ASCII - recommended per RFC7230 section 3.2.4) or 'data' needs encoding via RFC 2047 encoding not via utf8.
There are a few special cases where folk have incorrectly shoved utf8 into header values and we need to make it possible for folk working within WSGI to do that - which is why the API is the way it is - but we shouldn't make it *easier* for them to do the wrong thing.
I'd support an API that DTRT here by taking a string, tries US_ASCII, with fallback to MIME encoded with utf8 as the encoding parameter.