[twill] empty textareas submit newline?

[Titus Brown]

-> i have a simple webpage with a form with a textarea,
-> like:
->      <form action="" method="get">
->          <textarea name="teaser" rows="10" cols="40"></textarea>
->      </form>
-> </body>
-> 
-> the problem is that when i go there with twill, and do a submit, it 
-> submits this:
-> 
-> textarea.html?teaser=%0A
-> 
-> a newline.
-> 
-> a different way to reproduce the problem is to simply use "showforms".
-> and you will see that for all the should-be-empty textareas the content 
-> is a newline (there is an empty line below the textarea's line).
-> 
-> so, is this a bug or i am doing something very stupid :) ?

Hi, Gabor,

in a classic example of a not-good situation... the problem lies deeper
than I'd like to go for the moment.

First off, the 'handle_data' function of ClientForm.AbstractFormParser
gets a newline when there's no text there.  This indicates that the
problem lies somewhere directly in the parsing code, and not in
logistical code later on.

Secondly, only a single newline occurs even when there's a newline
explicitly in place, e.g.

<textarea></textarea>

and

<textarea>
</textarea>

give identical results.

This means that I can't hack in a fix without potentially causing
trouble to people who *want* a newline!  Sigh.

How big a problem is this for you at the moment?  Can I safely ignore
it, or is this causing you real trouble?

--titus