python-bug-12398

py27-str-unicode-bytes.py

#! /usr/bin/env python

"""
    This code works with Python 2.6 but fails on Python 2.7
"""

import httplib, urllib2
params = b'\x40\x00\x01\x02\xFF'

url = unicode("http://posttestserver.com/post.php")
req = urllib2.Request(url, data=params)
urllib2.urlopen(req)

Workaround for this issue:

byte_params = bytearray(params)
req = urllib2.Request(url, data=byte_params)
urllib2.urlopen(req)

url can't contain non-ascii characters that are not percent-encoded (rfc3986) therefore the correct fix is to never use unicode for urls. In this case url = url.encode('ascii') is enough.