Opened 7 years ago

Last modified 7 years ago

#29323 closed Bug

HTTPRequest QueryDict wrongly decodes binary encoded values in python2 — at Initial Version

Reported by: Thomas Riccardi Owned by: nobody
Component: HTTP handling Version: 1.11
Severity: Normal Keywords:
Cc: Claude Paroz Triage Stage: Unreviewed
Has patch: no Needs documentation: no
Needs tests: no Patch needs improvement: no
Easy pickings: no UI/UX: no

Description

application/x-www-form-urlencoded bodies allow binary values: just percent-escape (most of) the bytes.

It doesn't work with python2 and django.

In python2, QueryDict returns an unicode string for values, which makes it impossible to represent binary data.
Worse: it returns an unicode string whose unicode code points are the raw expected bytes (caused by lax behavior of str.decode('iso-8859-1')) so it silently fails.

Example:

q = QueryDict('foo=%00%7f%80%ff')
q['foo']
# actual: 
# u'\x00\x7f\x80\xff'
# expected:
# '\x00\x7f\x80\xff'

Relevant code:
https://github.com/django/django/blob/f89b11b879b83aa505dc8231da5f06ca4b1b062e/django/http/request.py#L397-L401

This was introduced by https://github.com/django/django/commit/fa02120d360387bebbbe735e86686bb4c7c43db2 while trying to accept broken user agents that send non-ascii as urlencoded raw values:

  • the python 3 version seems fine: it tries to decode before calling the query string parser (from urllib)
  • the python 2 version made a mistake: it decodes after calling the query string parser (and only on the value, not the key strangely)

I'm not sure how to fix this, as there are many locations where the key and value are re-encoded (appendlist does it too..)

I have not (yet) tested with python3.

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