[Python-Dev] bytes.from_hex() (original) (raw)

Bob Ippolito bob at redivi.com
Sun Feb 19 23:49:48 CET 2006

On Feb 19, 2006, at 10:55 AM, Martin v. Löwis wrote:

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

BTW, what use cases do you have in mind for Unicode -> Unicode decoding? I think "rot13" falls into that category: it is a transformation on text, not on bytes.

The current implementation is a transformation on bytes, not text.
Conceptually though, it's a text->text transform.

For other "odd" cases: "base64" goes Unicode->bytes in the decode direction, not in the encode direction. Some may argue that base64 is bytes, not text, but in many applications, you can combine base64 (or uuencode) with abitrary other text in a single stream. Of course, it could be required that you go u.encode("ascii").decode("base64").

I would say that base64 is bytes->bytes. Just because those bytes
happen to be in a subset of ASCII, it's still a serialization meant
for wire transmission. Sometimes it ends up in unicode (e.g. in
XML), but that's the exception not the rule.

-bob

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