Python 3 Notes

This part of the documentation outlines special information required to use Werkzeug and WSGI on Python 3.

Warning

Python 3 support in Werkzeug is currently highly experimental. Please give feedback on it and help us improve it.

WSGI Environment

The WSGI environment on Python 3 works slightly different than it does on Python 2. For the most part Werkzeug hides the differences from you if you work on the higher level APIs. The main difference between Python 2 and Python 3 is that on Python 2 the WSGI environment contains bytes whereas the environment on Python 3 contains a range of differently encoded strings.

There are two different kinds of strings in the WSGI environ on Python 3:

• unicode strings restricted to latin1 values. These are the used for HTTP headers and a few other things.
• unicode strings carrying binary payload, roundtripped through latin1 values. This is usually referred as “WSGI encoding dance” throughout Werkzeug.

Werkzeug provides you with functionality to deal with these automatically so that you don’t need to be aware of the inner workings. The following functions and classes should be used to read information out of the WSGI environment:

• get_current_url()
• get_host()
• get_script_name()
• get_path_info()
• get_query_string()
• EnvironHeaders()

Applications are strongly discouraged to create and modify a WSGI environment themselves on Python 3 unless they take care of the proper decoding step. All high level interfaces in Werkzeug will apply the correct encoding and decoding steps as necessary.

URLs

URLs in Werkzeug attempt to represent themselves as unicode strings on Python 3. All the parsing functions generally also provide functionality that allow operations on bytes. In some cases functions that deal with URLs allow passing in None as charset to change the return value to byte objects. Internally Werkzeug will now unify URIs and IRIs as much as possible.

Request Cleanup

Request objects on Python 3 and PyPy require explicit closing when file uploads are involved. This is required to properly close temporary file objects created by the multipart parser. For that purpose the close() method was introduced.

In addition to that request objects now also act as context managers that automatically close.