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

Baptiste Carvello baptiste13z at free.fr
Thu Jun 10 12:27:33 CEST 2010

Victor Stinner a écrit :

I suppose that each codec will have a different list of accepted input and output types. Example: bz2: encode:bytes->bytes, decode:bytes->bytes rot13: encode:str->str, decode:str->str hex: encode:bytes->str, decode: str->bytes

A user point of view: please NO.

This might be more consistent with the semantics, but it forces users to scratch their head each time to find out which types are involved. I'd rather all methods take and return the same types, independant of codec, that is:

.encode : str->bytes .decode : bytes->str .(un)transform : same type, str->str or bytes->bytes

All other uses can be trivially done with .encode('ascii')/.decode('ascii'). Changing the type of ascii text is easy, understanding bytes vs str semantics is not!

Cheers, B.

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