web.safeunicode

[acaligac]

Closes #12513

replaces web.safeunicode w str()
(sorry for the crazy amount of edits the first time around, pre commit added soo many extra fixes when i ran it :))

Stakeholders

[mekarpeles]

Thank you for the contribution, @acaligac!

🤖 Copilot has been assigned for an initial review.

@RayBB is assigned to this PR and currently has:

• 4 open PR(s) of equal or higher priority to review first

PR triage checklist (maintainers / Pam)

• PR description — not empty; explains what the change does and how to verify it
• References an issue — PR body contains a #NNN reference
  • Linked issue is triaged — has a Priority: * label (not just Needs: Triage)
  • Linked issue is assigned — has at least one assignee
• Commit history clean — no WIP/fixup/conflict noise; commit messages are meaningful
• CI passing — no failing check-runs
• Test cases present — if the change touches substantive logic, test coverage exists or is explained
• Proof of testing — PR body includes a description of what was tested, a screenshot, or a video

Note

This comment was automatically generated by Pam, Open Library's Project AI Manager, on behalf of @mekarpeles. Pam is designed to provide status visibility, perform basic project management functions and relevant codebase research, and provide actionable feedback so contributors aren't left waiting.

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

This PR modernizes the codebase by removing uses of web.safeunicode(...) (a legacy web.py unicode helper) in favor of Python’s built-in str(...), aligning with Python 3 string handling and reducing reliance on deprecated web.py utilities.

Changes:

• Replaced web.safeunicode(...) with str(...) across the remaining occurrences in the OpenLibrary codebase.
• Simplified a couple of dict comprehensions while performing the replacement.
• Updated URL redirect and table-of-contents normalization paths to use str(...).

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 5 out of 5 changed files in this pull request and generated 1 comment.

Show a summary per file

File	Description
openlibrary/utils/olmemcache.py	Uses str(...) for memcache multi-get result keys instead of web.safeunicode(...).
openlibrary/plugins/upstream/utils.py	Replaces web.safeunicode(...) with str(...) in HTML and upstream memcache key handling.
openlibrary/plugins/upstream/merge_authors.py	Uses str(...) when normalizing table-of-contents row titles.
openlibrary/plugins/ol_infobase.py	Uses str(...) when fixing table-of-contents row titles during JSON processing.
openlibrary/core/processors/readableurls.py	Uses str(...) for redirect URL concatenation and readable URL path components.

[RayBB]

Thanks for opening the PR here and no worries about the last one.

This has no functional changes since the code is equal but to be safe anyway I pulled it down and ran locally and deployed to testing. Didn't hit any errors. Also for sanity asked AI to triple check and confirmed it's all good.