Paul Winkler wrote at 2008-9-12 09:04 -0400:
Is there a concensus on the best way in zope 2 to handle non-ascii object IDs? The current restrictions are based on a very old, gradually updated regex which still isn't right, see for example https://bugs.launchpad.net/zope2/+bug/143616
There is a branch which gets rid of the restrictions "http://svn.zope.org/Zope/branches/dm-arbitrary-ids/". It awaits "wetting" (special wish of Tres Seaver).
... Even if that's wrong, the ascii assumption seems to be so widespread in Zope 2 that I think, short of a full audit and a comprehensive plan, gradually using isinstance(foo, basestring) might just be false advertising that leads people into trouble.
Our local Zope got rid of the ASCII restriction several years ago, mainly to support WebDAV with the same naming conventions as typical file systems (i.e. including special characters (umlauts) in names). We have met only one problem: MS-WebDAV usually does not change the encoding -- but some WebDAV operations ("rename", "copy") follow the recommendation of HTML 4.01 to first "utf-8" encode and then url encode. Thus, we had to cope with both a "native" encoding and an utf-8 encoding. -- Dieter