[Zope-dev] request.get vs request.form.get

[Maurits van Rees]

I have been busy with zope.formlib.  See this weblog entry for some
background:

http://maurits.vanrees.org/weblog/archive/2007/11/search-forms-with-zope-formlib-and-batching

This is Plone 3 with Zope 2.10.4 btw.


I discovered there is a difference between getting a value from the
request or from request.form when unicode is involved.  From a pdb
session:

>>> request.form.get('SearchableText')
u'\xff'
>>> request.get('SearchableText')
'\xc3\xbf'

This is the character ÿ: a y with something extra on top. :) You can
see the same in a python prompt (I hope this is readable for
everyone):

>>> u"ÿ"
u'\xff'
>>> "ÿ"
'\xc3\xbf'


This gave me problems while using zope.formlib.  In the method
zope.app.form.browser.textwidgets.TextWidget._getFormInput() the value
is fetched from the request and not request.form. So you get a
UnicodeDecodeError. In the weblog entry I mentioned I post some code
to guard against that in a setUpWidgets method in your own form page:
deliberately overwrite the variable in the request by the variable in
request.form.

But what I want to ask here is: does something need to be fixed
somewhere in zope?

Should the value in request and request.form really be the same
always?  Probably: always unicode?

Should zope.app.form.browser.textwidgets.TextWidget._getFormInput()
get the value from the form instead of from the request?

Thanks,

-- 
Maurits van Rees | http://maurits.vanrees.org/ [NL]
            Work | http://zestsoftware.nl/
"Do not worry about your difficulties in computers,
 I can assure you mine are still greater."