vm.send_file: <unicode> URL + <str> file contents = UnicodeDecodeError

[GoogleCodeExporter]

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Set up your server connection
2. Get a VM entity
3. Call `vm.send_file(bla, bla)`

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?
I expect the local file to be uploaded to the guest.  Instead, I've been seeing 
stuff like this:

  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pysphere/vi_virtual_machine.py", line 1193, in send_file
    resp = opener.open(request)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 400, in open
    response = self._open(req, data)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 418, in _open
    '_open', req)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 378, in _call_chain
    result = func(*args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 1215, in https_open
    return self.do_open(httplib.HTTPSConnection, req)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 1174, in do_open
    h.request(req.get_method(), req.get_selector(), req.data, headers)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/httplib.py", line 958, in request
    self._send_request(method, url, body, headers)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/httplib.py", line 992, in _send_request
    self.endheaders(body)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/httplib.py", line 954, in endheaders
    self._send_output(message_body)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/httplib.py", line 812, in _send_output
    msg += message_body
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x89 in position 0: ordinal 
not in range(128)

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?
I'm the latest svn revision, or r75 of `vi_virtual_machine.py`.  Only testing 
with Python 2.7 on Arch Linux.

Please provide any additional information below.
This problem only started appearing recently--I've been able to send files to 
guest systems without a problem since I started using pysphere a month or two 
ago.  I'm not sure what changed, exactly, but somewhere along the line it 
appears that the "msg" you see in the last line of the stack trace is a unicode 
object while the "message_body" from the same line is a str object.  The "msg" 
variable holds a bunch of header information, while the "message_body" contains 
the actual binary content of the file I'm trying to send.

I've watched/debugged this off and on for a few days, and it seems that the 
problem goes away if I simply force the URL to be a str object sometime before 
this line in vi_virtual_machine.py:

    request = urllib2.Request(url, data=content)

Original issue reported on code.google.com by [email protected] on 30 Jul 2012 at 5:02

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Thanks for the detailed info. I'll be checking that out

Original comment by [email protected] on 31 Jul 2012 at 12:58

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I reported and showed how to fix this issue as a one line change in the google 
group: 
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/pysphere/michael$20specter/pysphere/A
7EPrquJAnQ/q3EJhNw-UIAJ

TL;DR

On line 1280 in vi_virtual_machine.py, change
             request = urllib2.Request(url, data=content)
To:
             request = urllib2.Request(url.encode('utf-8'), data=content)

-Mike

Original comment by [email protected] on 8 Aug 2013 at 4:53

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Any chance in getting this fixed and releasing a new version to Pypi?

Tim

Original comment by [email protected] on 8 Aug 2013 at 4:54

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I've been rolling my own build with this exact patch since before I created 
this issue. It has been working great for me.

Original comment by [email protected] on 8 Aug 2013 at 4:57

[GoogleCodeExporter]

More than 2 years later.... any chance this could become official yet? I've 
been using my original patch this whole time, and I've not had any bad side 
effects from it.

Original comment by [email protected] on 6 Oct 2014 at 8:07