mask_password doesn't return unicode type value if non-ASCII characters exist in the message

[javeme]

mask_password doesn't return unicode type value[1] if non-ASCII characters exist in the message.

If non-ASCII characters doesn't exist in the message, mask_password returns unicode value:

    >>> from oslo_utils import strutils
    >>> utf8_str = u'test --password Chinese.'.encode('utf8')
    >>> masked = strutils.mask_password(utf8_str)
    >>> type(masked)
    <type 'unicode'>

If non-ASCII characters exist in the message, mask_password returns str value:

    >>> from oslo_utils import strutils
    >>> utf8_str = u'test --password Chinese中文.'.encode('utf8')
    >>> masked = strutils.mask_password(utf8_str)
    >>> type(masked)
    <type 'str'>

The uncertainty of the return type will cause an exception in the following scenario:

    from oslo_serialization import jsonutils
    from oslo_utils import strutils

    def serialize(message_dict):
        utf8_data = jsonutils.dump_as_bytes(message_dict, ensure_ascii=False)
        unicode_data = strutils.mask_password(utf8_data)
        utf8_data = unicode_data.encode('utf8')
        return utf8_data

    # scenario 1: without non-ASCII
    message_dict = {u'name': u'test --password Chinese.'}
    body = serialize(message_dict) # OK

    # scenario 2: with non-ASCII
    message_dict = {u'name': u'test --password Chinese 中文.'}
    body = serialize(message_dict) # UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe4 in position 30: ordinal not in range(128)

NOTE: There is a way to avoid this problem by converting message to unicode before passed into mask_password:

    strutils.mask_password(six.text_type(utf8_data, 'utf8'))

[1]: https://github.com/openstack/oslo.utils/blob/master/oslo_utils/strutils.py#L233

[ChangBo Guo(gcb) (glongwave)]

Is there any use case in openstack projects ?

[Takashi Kajinami (kajinamit)]

I'm closing this because we haven't heard any response for 7+ years