[Bug 83974] Re: webbrowser incorrectly handles quoted arguments

[Matt Zimmerman]

Yes, this behaviour can be replicated by e.g.:

firefox '"http://www.piware.de"'

so the problem is spurious quoting somewhere.

The webbrowser module interprets the gconf value as whitespace-separated
arguments:

        # get the web browser string from gconftool
        gc = 'gconftool-2 -g /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command 2>/dev/null'
[...]
            register("gnome", None, BackgroundBrowser(commd.split()))

whereas gnomevfs uses g_shell_parse_argv:

        path = g_strconcat (GCONF_URL_HANDLER_PATH, scheme, "/command", NULL);
        template = gconf_client_get_string (client, path, NULL);
[...]
        if (!g_shell_parse_argv (template,
                                 &argc,
                                 &argv,
                                 NULL)) {

which does the right thing with quotes if used in the gconf value.  So,
the root problem is that gnomevfs and python's webbrowser module
interpret the string differently.  I think it's safe to say that
gnomevfs is more authoritative, and so the bug belongs to Python.

-- 
webbrowser incorrectly handles quoted arguments
https://launchpad.net/bugs/83974