[Python-Dev] base64 -- should b64encode introduce line breaks? (original) (raw)

Barry Warsaw barry at python.org
Fri Sep 14 20:34:44 CEST 2007

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On Sep 13, 2007, at 2:43 PM, Bill Janssen wrote:

I see that base64.b64encode and base64.standardb64encode no longer introduce line breaks into the output strings, as base64.encodestring does. Shouldn't there be an option on one of them to do this? See: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-bugs-list/2001-October/ 007856.html section 2.1 of http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3548.html Perhaps adding MIMEb64encode() and PEMb64encode() routines? Or just an optional parameter to standardb64encode, called "maxlinelength", defaulting to 0, meaning no max?

It turns out to be inconvenient in other contexts to do the line
splitting at this lower level, so I would prefer to leave the current
methods as is (that means, no change in semantics or arguments).

I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to new functions that did the line
splitting, but ideally, you could design an API that provided that
behavior for any of the existing alternatives in the base64 module,
without duplicating them all. It's not clear to me how you'd do that
though (or if it's worth it).

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