[Python-Dev] Reintroduce or drop completly hex, bz2, rot13, ... codecs (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Wed Jun 9 14:17:48 CEST 2010

On Wed, 9 Jun 2010 13:57:05 +0200 Dirkjan Ochtman <dirkjan at ochtman.nl> wrote:

On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 13:40, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote: > No, I don't think so. If I'm using hex "encoding", it's because I want > to see a text representation of some arbitrary bytestring (in order to > display it inside another piece of text, for example). > In other words, the purpose of hex is precisely to give a textual > display of non-textual data.

Or I want to encode binary data in a non-binary-safe protocol, in which case I probably want bytes.

In this case you would probably choose a more space-efficient representation, such as base64 or base85. Which is why I think the purpose of hex is mostly for textual representation.

Regards

Antoine.

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