I'm assuming this is the patch you were looking for. However, there are a couple of unrelated issues with http.client.send that jumped out at me:

1. Encoding a file handed directly to send() seems wrong. If a client wants to send a file encoded using something other than iso-8859-1, we've effectively short-circuited that. Since the normal request() calls take care of encoding, it seems send() should be for those that 'know what they're doing'. 

Also, nowhere in the send() documentation does it state that send() will perform this encoding (and only on a file, but not on a string?).

Removing the burden of encoding if a file-like object is passed seems more reasonable and would make the code considerably clearer. If anyone agrees, I'll open a new ticket with patch for this issue.