Python interface to PayPal - urllib.urlencode non-ASCII characters failing
- by krys
I am trying to implement PayPal IPN functionality. The basic protocol is as such:
The client is redirected from my site to PayPal's site to complete payment. He logs into his account, authorizes payment.
PayPal calls a page on my server passing in details as POST. Details include a person's name, address, and payment info etc.
I need to call a URL on PayPal's site internally from my processing page passing back all the params that were passed in abovem and an additional one called 'cmd' with a value of '_notify-validate'.
When I try to urllib.urlencode the params which PayPal has sent to me, I get a:
While calling send_response_to_paypal. Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<snip>/account/paypal/views.py", line 108, in process_paypal_ipn
verify_result = send_response_to_paypal(params)
File "<snip>/account/paypal/views.py", line 41, in send_response_to_paypal
params = urllib.urlencode(params)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/urllib.py", line 1261, in urlencode
v = quote_plus(str(v))
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\ufffd' in position 9: ordinal not in range(128)
I understand that urlencode does ASCII encoding, and in certain cases, a user's contact info can contain non-ASCII characters. This is understandable. My question is, how do I encode non-ASCII characters for POSTing to a URL using urllib2.urlopen(req) (or other method)
Details:
I read the params in PayPal's original request as follows (the GET is for testing):
def read_ipn_params(request):
if request.POST:
params= request.POST.copy()
if "ipn_auth" in request.GET:
params["ipn_auth"]=request.GET["ipn_auth"]
return params
else:
return request.GET.copy()
The code I use for sending back the request to PayPal from the processing page is:
def send_response_to_paypal(params):
params['cmd']='_notify-validate'
params = urllib.urlencode(params)
req = urllib2.Request(PAYPAL_API_WEBSITE, params)
req.add_header("Content-type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded")
response = urllib2.urlopen(req)
status = response.read()
if not status == "VERIFIED":
logging.warn("PayPal cannot verify IPN responses: " + status)
return False
return True
Obviously, the problem only arises if someone's name or address or other field used for the PayPal payment does not fall into the ASCII range.
