http://docs.python.org/whatsnew/node18.html says that
unicode host names are allowed in the socket module
(automatically converting them by the IDNA spec), but
is seems the support is not fully implemented.

only the connect method of a socket instance will do
the auto conversion to a 'idna' string. 
socket.getaddr* functions will not!

Also other modules should support unicode hostnames.
(httplib already does) but urllib and urllib2 don't.

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Would you be interested in developing patches? For the
socket module, the bug is clear, and probably
straight-forward to fix. For urllib[2], issues are more
difficult, as Python should eventually support IRIs. It
appears that draft-duerst-iri-09 is going to become the RFC,
so changes for urllib either need to take this into account,
or be postponed after the RFC is published.

I was about to report this for the socket module - the gethostbyname(), gethostbyname_ex() and getnameinfo() functions are the only things currently affected in that module as far as I can see.  3.x is affected too - the functions will pass non-ASCII Unicode to the system as UTF-8 there.  The attached patch fixes them in 2.x and 3.x.

Updated the socket module patch to include gethostbyaddr() - it
happens to accept hostnames and is used this way in the standard
library.

Thanks for the patch. Committed as r84261.

I'm not sure what the point is of supporting IDNA in getnameinfo, so I have removed that from the patch. If you think it's needed, please elaborate.

Two builders are sad:
 * x86 gentoo
 * sparc solaris10 gcc

======================================================================
ERROR: test_idna (test.test_socket.GeneralModuleTests)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home2/buildbot/slave/3.x.loewis-sun/build/Lib/test/test_socket.py", line 644, in test_idna
    socket.getaddrinfo('\u0438\u0441\u043f\u044b\u0442\u0430\u043d\u0438\u0435.python.org',0)
socket.gaierror: [Errno 9] service name not available for the specified socket type

http://www.python.org/dev/buildbot/builders/x86%20gentoo%203.x/builds/2898
http://www.python.org/dev/buildbot/builders/sparc%20solaris10%20gcc%203.x/builds/1472

> Thanks for the patch. Committed as r84261.
> 
> I'm not sure what the point is of supporting IDNA in getnameinfo, so I have removed that from the patch. If you think it's needed, please elaborate.

I don't see the point of it either, but if it's not supposed to
accept hostnames, it should use AI_NUMERICHOST in the call it
makes to getaddrinfo().  As it is, it does both forward and
reverse lookups when called with a hostname.

Attaching a patch to use AI_NUMERICHOST.

Also, this issue # isn't really resolved yet as Python does not
support IRIs (AFAIK).

I have now committed file 18615 as r84313: thanks for the patch.

I have split this issue into two: this one is only about the socket module, and #9679 carries any remaining features (it would be good if we have only one bug per bug report).

Since the buildbots are also happy now (after r84277), I'm closing this as fixed again.