[Python-Dev] Python-3.0, unicode, and os.environ

[Adam Olsen]

On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 2:09 PM, André Malo <nd at perlig.de> wrote:
> * Adam Olsen wrote:
>> On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 1:02 PM, Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> > I opened up bug http://bugs.python.org/issue4006 a while ago and it was
>> > suggested in the report that it's not a bug but a feature and so I
>> > should come here to see about getting the feature changed :-)
>> >
>> > I have a specific problem with os.environ and a somewhat less important
>> > architectural issue with the unicode/bytes handling in certain os.*
>> > modules.  I'll start with the important one:
>> >
>> > Currently in python3 there's no way to get at environment variables
>> > that are not encoded in the system default encoding.  My understanding
>> > is that this isn't a problem on Windows systems but on *nix this is a
>> > huge problem.  environment variables on *nix are a sequence of non-null
>> > bytes.  These bytes are almost always "characters" but they do not have
>> > to be.  Further, there is nothing that requires that the characters be
>> > in the same encoding; some of the characters could be in the UTF-8
>> > character set while others are in latin-1, shift-jis, or big-5.
>>
>> Multiple encoding environments are best described as "batshit insane".
>>  It's impossible to handle any of it correctly *as text*, which is why
>> UTF-8 is becoming a universal standard.  For everybody's sanity python
>> should continue to push it.
>
> Here's an example which will become popular soon, I guess: CGI scripts and,
> of course WSGI applications. All those get their environment in an unknown
> encoding. In the worst case one can blow up the application by simply
> sending strange header lines over the wire. But there's more: consider
> running the server in C locale, then probably even a single 8 bit char
> might break something (?).

I think that's an argument that the framework should reencode all
input text into the correct system encoding before passing it on to
the CGI script or WSGI app.  If the framework doesn't have a clear way
to determine the client's encoding then it's all just gibberish
anyway.  A HTTP 400 or 500 range error code is appropriate here.


>> However, some pragmatism is also possible.  Many uses of PATH may
>> allow it to be treated as black-box bytes, rather than text.  The
>> minimal solution I see is to make os.getenv() and os.putenv() switch
>> to byte modes when given byte arguments, as os.listdir() does.  This
>> use case doesn't require the ability to iterate over all environment
>> variables, as os.environb would allow.
>>
>> I do wonder if controlling the environment given to a subprocess
>> requires os.environb, but it may be too obscure to really matter.
>
> IMHO, environment variables are no text. They are bytes by definition and
> should be treated as such.
> I know, there's windows having unicode enabled env vars on demand, but
> there's only trouble with those over there in apache's httpd (when passing
> them to CGI scripts, oh well...).

Environment variables have textual names, are set via text, frequently
contain textual file names or paths, and my shell (bash in
gnome-terminal on ubuntu) lets me put unicode text in just fine.  The
underlying APIs may use bytes, but they're *intended* to be encoded
text.


-- 
Adam Olsen, aka Rhamphoryncus