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

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Wed Jun 9 22:13:28 CEST 2010

But in both cases you probably want bytes -> bytes and str -> str. If you want text out then put text in, if you want bytes out then put bytes in. 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.

I think this is the way it is for consistency reasons (which I would not lightly wish away). I think you agree that base64 is a bytes->bytes transformation (because you typically use it as a payload on some wire protocol).

So:

py> binascii.b2a_base64(b'foo') b'Zm9v\n' py> binascii.b2a_hex(b'foo') b'666f6f'

Now, I'd admit that "b2a" may be a misnomer (binary -> ASCII), but then it may not because ASCII actually also implies "bytes" (it's an encoding).

So what would you propose to change: b2a_hex should return a Unicode string? or this future transform method should return a Unicode string, whereas the module returns bytes? Something else?

Regards, Martin

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list