W3C Baggage propagator uses form encoding instead of percent encoding

[dwin-gharibi]

Describe your environment

Labels: bug, api, propagator, spec-compliance
Affected packages: opentelemetry-api
Found on: main @ 0a5d76b6
Environment: CPython 3.12

What happened?

W3CBaggagePropagator encodes and decodes baggage with quote_plus / unquote_plus, which is application/x-www-form-urlencoded. That form maps a space to + and decodes + back to a space. The W3C Baggage grammar defines baggage-octet as %x21 / %x23-2B / %x2D-3A / %x3C-5B / %x5D-7E, so + (%x2B) is an ordinary literal that must be preserved, and SP (%x20) is excluded and must be percent-encoded as %20.

Both directions are wrong, and neither raises: values are silently corrupted as they cross a service boundary.

Steps to Reproduce

from opentelemetry.baggage import get_all, set_baggage
from opentelemetry.baggage.propagation import W3CBaggagePropagator

p = W3CBaggagePropagator()

# extract: a compliant peer sends a literal "+"
print(dict(get_all(p.extract({"baggage": "key=a+b"}))))

# inject: a value containing a space
carrier = {}
p.inject(carrier, context=set_baggage("key", "a b"))
print(carrier)

Expected Result

extract of key=a+b yields {'key': 'a+b'}, and inject of a value containing a space emits key=a%20b.

Actual Result

{'key': 'a b'}          # extract corrupted "a+b" into "a b"
{'baggage': 'key=a+b'}  # inject emitted "+" where %20 is required

# further extract cases
wire 'key=+'      -> ''       (value destroyed entirely)
wire 'key=c++'    -> 'c'      (trailing strip() eats the rest)
wire 'key=a+b+c'  -> 'a b c'

Additional context

Silent data corruption at service boundaries in any polyglot deployment. Baggage commonly carries tenant identifiers, routing keys and feature flags, so a corrupted value can misroute a request rather than merely degrade telemetry. OpenTelemetry implementations in other languages percent-encode, so the corruption only appears when Python talks to a non-Python peer - which makes it hard to spot in a single-language test environment.

Would you like to implement a fix?

Yes

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