[Mod-pubsub-developer] Event element encoding

[Robert L. <ro...@le...>]

At 04:15 AM 23/03/2004, Adam Rifkin wrote:

>pubsublib.py is stubbed out for a lot of features we were
>one day going to get to, but it was the goal in starting
>that library to make it a reference implementation for other
>client libraries.

With that in mind, what are the rules for encoding event element names and 
values?

The protocol document says "A server will always escape the following 
bytes: colon (U+003A), the equals sign (U+003D), and leading and trailing 
spaces (U+0020) in element names and values. Other bytes may be escaped, as 
in the above example (where all control characters are escaped.) ". - with 
the 'Other bytes *may* be escaped' not being very helpful :-)

The pubsub server code only encodes "=:\n" for the headers and "=\n" for 
the value using an internal function.

The pubsub client says " Header name and value, for the named headers, may 
contain quoted bytes written quoted-printable style as an equal sign 
followed by 2 hexadecimal digits.  Specifically, any colons in the header 
name, any leading horizonal_whitespace in the value, and any 
vertical_whitespace or equal signs in the header or value, must be quoted 
this way." and then uses the Python quopri.decode library function which 
does things a little differently, i.e. it uses the 'Q' encoding which is 
similar to "Quoted-Printable" but is different in significant areas, e.g. 
it may represent spaces as underscores, according to the RFC it is based on.

Robert