Python 3.0 urllib.parse error "Type str doesn't support the buffer API"

python cgi python-3.x urllib
Evan Fosmark picture Evan Fosmark · Feb 12, 2009 · Viewed 34.6k times · Source 
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.0/cgi.py", line 477, in __init__
    self.read_urlencoded()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.0/cgi.py", line 577, in read_urlencoded
    self.strict_parsing):
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.0/urllib/parse.py", line 377, in parse_qsl
    pairs = [s2 for s1 in qs.split('&') for s2 in s1.split(';')]
TypeError: Type str doesn't support the buffer API

Can anybody direct me on how to avoid this? I'm getting it through feeding data into the cgi.Fieldstorage and I can't seem to do it any other way.

Answer

bobince picture bobince · Feb 12, 2009

urllib is trying to do:

b'a,b'.split(',')

Which doesn't work. byte strings and unicode strings mix even less smoothly in Py3k than they used to — deliberately, to make encoding problems go wrong sooner rather than later.

So the error is rather opaquely telling you ‘you can't pass a byte string to urllib.parse’. Presumably you are doing a POST request, where the form-encoded string is coming into cgi as a content body; the content body is still a byte string/stream so it now clashes with the new urllib.

So yeah, it's a bug in cgi.py, yet another victim of 2to3 conversion that hasn't been fixed properly for the new string model. It should be converting the incoming byte stream to characters before passing them to urllib.

Did I mention Python 3.0's libraries (especially web-related ones) still being rather shonky? :-)

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