[Web-SIG] HTTP headers encoding

Henry Precheur henry at precheur.org
Thu Dec 3 20:26:28 CET 2009


On Thu, Dec 03, 2009 at 05:09:31PM +0100, Manlio Perillo wrote:
> This is really a mess.

RFC 2617 doesn't specify any encoding for its headers, so it should be
latin-1 everywhere. But on the web nobody respect standards.

> How is authorization username handled in common WSGI frameworks?

As far as I know, they don't handle this. They just return the string
without dealing with the encoding issues.

I think there is no correct way of handling this, because 99% of
username/password contain only ascii characters. A possible 'workaround'
would be to limit yourself to the ascii charset. If you get a non-ascii
character raise an Exception.

-- 
  Henry Prêcheur


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