What’s New in WebOb 1.5

Backwards Incompatibilities

  • Response.set_cookie renamed the only required parameter from “key” to “name”. The code will now still accept “key” as a keyword argument, and will issue a DeprecationWarning until WebOb 1.7.

  • The status attribute of a Response object no longer takes a string like None None and allows that to be set as the status. It now has to at least match the pattern of <integer status code> <explenation of status code>. Invalid status strings will now raise a ValueError.

  • Morsel will no longer accept a cookie value that does not meet RFC6265’s cookie-octet specification. Upon calling Morsel.serialize a warning will be issued, in the future this will raise a ValueError, please update your cookie handling code. See https://github.com/Pylons/webob/pull/172

    The cookie-octet specification in RFC6265 states the following characters are valid in a cookie value:

    Hex Range Actual Characters
    [0x21     ] !
    [0x25-0x2B] #$%&'()*+
    [0x2D-0x3A] -./0123456789:
    [0x3C-0x5B] <=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[
    [0x5D-0x7E] ]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~

    RFC6265 suggests using base 64 to serialize data before storing data in a cookie.

    Cookies that meet the RFC6265 standard will no longer be quoted, as this is unnecessary. This is a no-op as far as browsers and cookie storage is concerned.

  • Response.set_cookie now uses the internal make_cookie API, which will issue warnings if cookies are set with invalid bytes. See https://github.com/Pylons/webob/pull/172

Features

Bug Fixes

  • The exceptions HTTPNotAcceptable, HTTPUnsupportedMediaType and HTTPNotImplemented will now correctly use the sub-classed template rather than the default error template. See https://github.com/Pylons/webob/issues/221
  • Response’s from_file now correctly deals with a status line that contains an HTTP version identifier. HTTP/1.1 200 OK is now correctly parsed, whereas before this would raise an error upon setting the Response.status in from_file. See https://github.com/Pylons/webob/issues/121
  • The cookie API functions will now make sure that max_age is an integer or an string that can convert to an integer. Previously passing in max_age=’test’ would have silently done the wrong thing.
  • Unbreak req.POST when the request method is PATCH. Instead of returning something cmpletely unrelated we return NoVar. See: https://github.com/Pylons/webob/pull/215
  • Response.status now uses duck-typing for integers, and has also learned to raise a ValueError if the status isn’t an integer followed by a space, and then the reason. See https://github.com/Pylons/webob/pull/191
  • Fixed a bug in webob.multidict.GetDict which resulted in the QUERY_STRING not being updated when changes were made to query params using Request.GET.extend().
  • Read the body of a request if we think it might have a body. This fixes PATCH to support bodies. See https://github.com/Pylons/webob/pull/184
  • Response.from_file returns HTTP headers as latin1 rather than UTF-8, this fixes the usage on Google AppEngine. See https://github.com/Pylons/webob/issues/99 and https://github.com/Pylons/webob/pull/150
  • Fix a bug in parsing the auth parameters that contained bad white space. This makes the parsing fall in line with what’s required in RFC7235. See https://github.com/Pylons/webob/issues/158
  • Use ‘rn’ line endings in Response.__str__. See: https://github.com/Pylons/webob/pull/146

Documentation Changes