What's New in WebOb 1.5 — WebOb 1.8.7 documentation

# What's New in WebOb 1.5

## Backwards Incompatibilities

- `Response.set_cookie` renamed the only required parameter from "key" to "name". The code will now still accept "key" as a keyword argument, and will issue a DeprecationWarning until WebOb 1.7.

- The `status` attribute of a `Response` object no longer takes a string like `None None` and allows that to be set as the status. It now has to at least match the pattern of `<integer status code> <explenation of status code>`. Invalid status strings will now raise a `ValueError`.

- `Morsel` will no longer accept a cookie value that does not meet RFC6265's cookie-octet specification. Upon calling `Morsel.serialize` a warning will be issued, in the future this will raise a `ValueError`, please update your cookie handling code. See https://github.com/Pylons/webob/pull/172

  The cookie-octet specification in RFC6265 states the following characters are valid in a cookie value:

  Hex Range | Actual Characters
  --- | ---
  `[0x21 ]` | `!`
  `[0x25-0x2B]` | `#$%&'()*+`
  `[0x2D-0x3A]` | `-./0123456789:`
  `[0x3C-0x5B]` | `<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[`
  `[0x5D-0x7E]` | `]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~`

  RFC6265 suggests using base 64 to serialize data before storing data in a cookie.

  Cookies that meet the RFC6265 standard will no longer be quoted, as this is unnecessary. This is a no-op as far as browsers and cookie storage is concerned.

- `Response.set_cookie` now uses the internal `make_cookie` API, which will issue warnings if cookies are set with invalid bytes. See https://github.com/Pylons/webob/pull/172

## Features

- Add support for some new caching headers, stale-while-revalidate and stale-if-error that can be used by reverse proxies to cache stale responses temporarily if the backend disappears. From RFC5861. See https://github.com/Pylons/webob/pull/189

## Bug Fixes

- Response.status now uses duck-typing for integers, and has also learned to raise a ValueError if the status isn't an integer followed by a space, and then the reason. See https://github.com/Pylons/webob/pull/191

- Fixed a bug in `webob.multidict.GetDict` which resulted in the QUERY_STRING not being updated when changes were made to query params using `Request.GET.extend()`.

- Read the body of a request if we think it might have a body. This fixes PATCH to support bodies. See https://github.com/Pylons/webob/pull/184

- Response.from_file returns HTTP headers as latin1 rather than UTF-8, this fixes the usage on Google AppEngine. See https://github.com/Pylons/webob/issues/99 and https://github.com/Pylons/webob/pull/150

- Fix a bug in parsing the auth parameters that contained bad white space. This makes the parsing fall in line with what's required in RFC7235. See https://github.com/Pylons/webob/issues/158

- Use 'rn' line endings in `Response.__str__`. See: https://github.com/Pylons/webob/pull/146

## Documentation Changes

- `response.set_cookie` now has proper documentation for `max_age` and `expires`. The code has also been refactored to use `cookies.make_cookie` instead of duplicating the code. This fixes https://github.com/Pylons/webob/issues/166 and https://github.com/Pylons/webob/issues/171

- Documentation didn't match the actual code for the wsgify function signature. See https://github.com/Pylons/webob/pull/167

- Remove the WebDAV only from certain HTTP Exceptions, these exceptions may also be used by REST services for example.