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

[Bjorn Tillenius]

On Tue, Jun 01, 2004 at 02:39:24PM +0200, Philipp von Weitershausen wrote:
> 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.

I tested some, and it seems that TALES use __call__ in favour of
__str__. Therefore I want to do the following:

 * Add __unicode__, which will of course return a unicode string.

 * Change __str__ so that it takes the unicode url, encodes it to
   utf-8, and urlquotes it before it gets returned.

No change will be done to __call__'s behaviour since I think it should
be easier to conform to the standards than to break them.

Is this OK with everyone?

Regards,
  Bjorn