In the cgi module, the parse_multipart() function duplicates code from FieldStorage, and the result is not compliant with that of FieldStorage for requests sent with multipart/form-data : for non-file fields, the value associated with a key is a list of *bytes* in parse_multipart() and a list of *strings* for FieldStorage (the bytes decoded with the argument "encoding" passed to FieldStorage()).

I will propose a PR on the Github repo with a version of parse_multipart that uses FieldStorage and returns the same result (values as strings). The function will take an additional argument "encoding".