[woodruffw]

I agree that the stdlib parser is a mess, but as an observation: replacing one use of it with a (better!) implementation introduces a potential parser differential where one didn’t exist before. I’ve seen this issue crop up multiple times in real Python codebases, where a well-intentioned developer adds a differential by incrementally replacing the old, bad implementation.

That’s the perverse nature of “wrong but ubiquitous” parsers: unless you’re confident that your replacement is complete, you can make the situation worse, not better.

[Spivak]

> unless you’re confident that your replacement is complete

And that any 3rd party libs you use also don't ever call the stdlib parser internally because you do not want to debug why a URL works through some code paths but not others.

Turns out that url parsing is a cross-cutting concern like logging where libs should defer to the calling code's implementation but the Python devs couldn't have known that when this module was written.