[New-bugs-announce] [issue36274] http.client cannot send non-ASCII request lines

[Tim Burke]

New submission from Tim Burke <tim.burke at gmail.com>:

While the RFCs are rather clear that non-ASCII data would be out of spec,

* that doesn't prevent a poorly-behaved client from sending non-ASCII bytes on the wire, which means
* as an application developer, it's useful to be able to mimic such a client to verify expected behavior while still using stdlib to handle things like header parsing, particularly since
* this worked perfectly well on Python 2.

The two most-obvious ways (to me, anyway) to try to send a request for /你好 (for example) are

    # Assume it will get UTF-8 encoded, as that's the default encoding
    # for urllib.parse.quote()
    conn.putrequest('GET', '/\u4f60\u597d')

    # Assume it will get Latin-1 encoded, as
    #   * that's the encoding used in http.client.parse_headers(),
    #   * that's the encoding used for PEP-3333, and
    #   * it has a one-to-one mapping with bytes
    conn.putrequest('GET', '/\xe4\xbd\xa0\xe5\xa5\xbd')

both fail with something like

    UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position ...

Trying to pre-encode like

    conn.putrequest('GET', b'/\xe4\xbd\xa0\xe5\xa5\xbd')

at least doesn't raise an error, but still does not do what was intended; rather than a request line like

    GET /你好 HTTP/1.1

(or

    /ä½ å¥½

depending on how you choose to interpret the bytes), the server gets

    GET b'/\xe4\xbd\xa0\xe5\xa5\xbd' HTTP/1.1

The trouble comes down to https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/v3.7.2/Lib/http/client.py#L1104-L1107 -- we don't actually have any control over what the caller passes as the url (so the assumption doesn't hold), nor do we know anything about the encoding that was *intended*.

One of three fixes seems warranted:

* Switch to using Latin-1 to encode instead of ASCII (again, leaning on the precedent set in parse_headers and PEP-3333). This may make it too easy to write an out-of-spec client, however.
* Continue to use ASCII to encode, but include errors='surrogateescape' to give callers an escape hatch. This seems like a reasonably high bar to ensure that the caller actually intends to send unquoted data.
* Accept raw bytes and actually use them (rather than their repr()), allowing the caller to decide upon an appropriate encoding.

----------
components: Library (Lib)
messages: 337802
nosy: tburke
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: http.client cannot send non-ASCII request lines
type: behavior
versions: Python 3.4, Python 3.5, Python 3.6, Python 3.7, Python 3.8

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<https://bugs.python.org/issue36274>
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