[Zope] Zope Cookie Handling

[Pearson, Brian Edward (GEA, 056278)]

All,

Here is another interesting issue that I have encountered while trying to
process cookies in Zope.

On a different app. server I have a Java class which generates an encrypted
cookie when a user logs into the site.  When the user navigates over to my
Zope site, I wish to check the value of the UID.  I do this by retrieving
the cookie within the following snippet of DTML:

<dtml-if "REQUEST.cookies.has_key('UID')">
		<dtml-call "REQUEST.set('cookie',
REQUEST.cookies.values())">
		<dtml-var "validateCookie(REQUEST, REQUEST['REMOTE_ADDR'])">
</dtml-if>	

This DTML calls a DTML method (validateCookie) which in turn is calling the
following External Python Method:

import xmlrpclib, base64

def validateUID(self, REQUEST, ipaddr):
        cookie = REQUEST.get('cookie')
        servlet =
xmlrpclib.Server("http://salesnet-dev.appl.ge.com/geaservlet/X
mlRpcTest")
        cookie = repr(cookie)
        cookie = cookie[2:]
        cookie = cookie[:-2]
        return servlet.validateCookie.check(cookie, ipaddr) 

This XML-RPC call attempts to invoke the Java decrypt method.  Herein lies
the problem:

Upon investigation of the value contained in the UID cookie, Zope returned
the following:
\316\313\321\310\316\315\314\311\321\312\316\317\317\223\310\321\315\317\313
\316\317'

If I print out each character created during the Java encrypt method, the
following values are returned:

\206\203\209\200\etc.etc.

A colleague of mine pointed out that Zope was returning the values in Octal
rather than decimal.

Is this behavior by design?  Is there another mechanism I can use to
retrieve the raw cookie value before Zope places it in a dictionary?  Rather
than code a string parsing routine in Java, are there any suggestions as to
how to convert each character back to decimal, or obtain the string prior to
being converted into octal?

Once again, I appreciate the assistance/responses.  Everyone on this group
has been wonderful to interact with.

-Brian