setting request.encoding damages request.POST

[Larry Martell]

(Pdb) print key
"u'right-carotidartery:63B2E474-D690-445F-B92A-31EBADDC9D93.png'"
(Pdb) type(request.POST[key])
<type 'unicode'>
(Pdb) request.encoding = "iso-8859-1"
(Pdb) type(request.POST[key])
* MultiValueDictKeyError:
"u'right-carotidartery:63B2E474-D690-445F-B92A-31EBADDC9D93.png'"

[Tim Graham]

It might be expected behavior -- see how setting ​request.encoding clears existing GET/POST data. If you believe it's a bug could you include a test for tests/request/tests.py or at least a complete code snippet we can run to reproduce the issue?

[Larry Martell]

OK, I didn't see that, so I guess it is expected. But then I don't understand this from the docs:

Any subsequent attribute accesses (such as reading from GET or POST) will use the new encoding value.

[Tim Graham]

I can't reproduce a crash with the attached tests. Can you provide more details to reproduce?

[Larry Martell]

Replying to timgraham:

I can't reproduce a crash with the attached tests. Can you provide more details to reproduce?

I have a view that does this:

keys = request.POST.keys()
for key in keys:
    # do something with request.POST[key]

and when I added this line inside the for loop:

request.encoding = "iso-8859-1"

I got a MultiValueDictKeyError when I accessed request.POST[key]. When I debugged it I observed what I posted in my initial post.

[Tim Graham]

Is it possible that the new encoding changes the name of the key?

[Larry Martell]

Replying to timgraham:

Is it possible that the new encoding changes the name of the key?

Perhaps this is what is happening. But I cannot test that anymore, as we've moved on and changed the way the client sends the request, so I am not using POST.keys any more (I am using request.FILES now). I don't have easy access to the client code to change it back to test. Sorry.

[Tim Graham]

Ok, closing as "needsinfo" since it's unclear if there's a bug in Django.

I created a follow up ticket to add some missing tests I noticed while investigate: #27113.