Google App Engine: how to unescape POST body?

Question

Newbie question...

I am using silverlight to POST data to my GAE application

  class XmlCrud(webapp.RequestHandler):
    def post(self):

      body = self.request.body

The data comes in fine but it is escaped like this:

%3C%3Fxml+version=%221.0%22+encoding%3D%22utf-16%22%3F%3E%0D%0A%3CBosses+xmlns%3Axsi%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2001%2FXMLSchema-instance%22+xmlns%3Axsd

how do I unescape it?

Answer 1

I'd recommend not encoding it in the first place if the body of the post is just an XML document.

Answer 2

I agree with Hank.

The answer to your actual question, though, is that your example is URL encoded. To decode, replace each %XX with the character having hex value 0xXX, and + with space.

urllib.unquote_plus does this, and according to the docs it's in App Engine

urllib docs: http://www.python.org/doc/2.5.2/lib/module-urllib.html

Statement that urllib is supported (there may be others): http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/urlfetch/overview.html