This is a similar issue to http://bugs.python.org/issue7093, but more insiduous:

This works:

xmlrpclib.ServerProxy(u'http://localhost:8080').foo(dict(baz=u'bär'))

While this fails with a UnicodeDecodeError (note the trailing slash in the URI):

xmlrpclib.ServerProxy(u'http://localhost:8080/').foo(dict(baz=u'bär'))

  File "/usr/local/python2.7/lib/python2.7/httplib.py", line 937, in endheaders
    self._send_output(message_body)
  File "/usr/local/python2.7/lib/python2.7/httplib.py", line 795, in _send_output
    msg += message_body
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 139: ordinal not in range(128)


So, somewhere in xmlrpclib, confusion happens, since even though the URI is passed in as unicode both times, it is stored as string in the first case (thus compatible with the serialized, utf-8 encoded string of the message body), but in the second case it remains unicode (thus failing, as #7093 tells, which I personally wouldn't have closed wontfix).

> (thus failing, as #7093 tells, which I personally wouldn't have
> closed wontfix).

I don't know the right encoding to encode a HTTP header. In Python 3, http.client.HTTPConnection.putheader() encodes header name to ASCII and header values to ISO-8859-1.

New patch using ISO-8859-1 instead of the default encoding (ASCII).

I guess it should use the configured encoding[1] (which is utf-8 by default) to do that, shouldn't it? Since that's the encoding that is used for the message body, too.


[1] http://docs.python.org/library/xmlrpclib.html#xmlrpclib.ServerProxy

"I guess it should use the configured encoding[1] (which is utf-8 by default) to do that, shouldn't it? Since that's the encoding that is used for the message body, too."

The URI is only used in HTTP headers, not in the body.

New changeset c02e790c4535 by Victor Stinner in branch '2.7':
Issue #12931: xmlrpclib now encodes Unicode URI to ISO-8859-1, instead of
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/c02e790c4535

New changeset 5ceab07bcd02 by Victor Stinner in branch '3.2':
Issue #12931: Add a test with Unicode URI to test_xmlrpc
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/5ceab07bcd02

New changeset 3b46f2e2d280 by Victor Stinner in branch 'default':
Merge 3.2: Issue #12931: Add a test with Unicode URI to test_xmlrpc
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/3b46f2e2d280

The change set committed for 2.7 introduces another problem. At the beginning of xmlrpclib.py, there is an explicit test for the availability of unicode:

try:
    unicode
except NameError:
    unicode = None # unicode support not available

In case unicode was set to None, a TypeError:
isinstance() arg 2 must be a class, type, or tuple of classes and types

will be raised by the code introduced to ServerProxy:

if isinstance(uri, unicode):
    uri = uri.encode('ISO-8859-1')