[Zope3-dev] Re: Make AbsoluteURL produce quoted urls

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

Bjorn Tillenius wrote:
> > No, I think there's a quite easy solution. AbsoluteURL.__call__ should 
> > return unicode so that one has all the options when using it from 
> > Python. AbsoluteURL.__str__ should return whatever __call__ would 
> > return, but encoded in UTF8. If I remember correctly, TALES first 
> > evaluates __str__ before __call__, so the path expressions would still 
> > be fine.
> 
> I'm almost fine with this, __str__ should still return ascii, it should
> quote the url instead (but maybe that's what you meant).

Indeed the spec (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2718.txt, section 2.2.5) 
suggests::

       Unless there is some compelling reason for a
       particular scheme to do otherwise, translating character sequences
       into UTF-8 (RFC 2279) [3] and then subsequently using the %HH
       encoding for unsafe octets is recommended.

So, __str__ could indeed first encode to UTF-8 and then urlquote so we 
end up with%HH. I can't come up with a good use case for wanting a 
string but not quoted, so having either unicode or a quoted string would 
be enough and easily implemented.

Philipp