[Python-Dev] urllib.quote and unquote - Unicode issues

Wed Jul 30 19:33:51 CEST 2008

> It looks like all other APIs in the Py3k version of
> urllib treat URLs as text.

The URL is text, a string of ASCII characters. We're just talking
about urllib.quote() and urllib.unquote(), which are there to support
the text-ization of binary values, and the de-text-ization.
> I think that would break too much code, without a good way to
> automatically fix it.

You'd rather break Python? Somehow I don't think so.
Here's the signature I'm proposing:
 quote() -- takes string or bytes, and produces string.
 If input is a string, looks to optional "encoding" parameter to
 determine character set encoding to use to transform it to byte before
 quoting it. If "encoding" is not specified, defaults to UTF-8.
 unquote() -- takes string, produces bytes or string
 If optional "encoding" parameter is specified, decodes bytes with
 that encoding and returns string. Otherwise, returns bytes.
Bill