Question

I am trying to get requests to pass on encoded strings in a URL. For example:

/application/controller/function/hello%20world

so that in my function I can access request.args and get a string that I can unquote().

I tried modifying rewrite.py to not convert %20 but that caused some error. Something else is catching these requests somewhere that I am having trouble finding. I noticed the httpserver.log file has:

127.0.0.1, 2011-09-02 00:12:09, GET, /application/controller/function/hello world, HTTP/1.1, 200, 0.169954

with the space already converted. Maybe that gives a hint. Where are the url’s getting unencoded?

Below are the contents of my routes file:

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

default_application = 'chips'
default_controller = 'default'
default_function = 'index'


routes_onerror = [
   (r'*/404', r'/chips/static/404.html')
   ,(r'*/*',  r'/chips/static/error.html')
]

Answer 1

By default, web2py will not allow special characters in args except ‘@’, ‘-‘, ‘=’, and ‘.’. To override that behavior, you can add the following to routes.py:

routes_apps_raw=['chips']

In that case, request.args will be set to None, and instead you can access the raw args from the URL via request.raw_args. Note, though, that routes_apps_raw does not work if you are using the parameter-based rewrite system (i.e., if your routes.py file includes a routers dictionary).

Note, even with the above change, the Rocket web server included with web2py will still automatically unquote() the URL, so you’ll get the special characters in request.raw_args, but they will already be decoded.

If you are instead using the parameter-based rewrite system, you can control which characters are allowed in URL args via the args_match key, which takes a regular expression as its value. The default regex is r'([\w@ -]|(?<=[\w@ -])[.=])*$', which allows ‘@’, ‘-‘, ‘=’, and ‘.’ (with some restrictions on ‘=’ and ‘.’).