[Python-Dev] Problems with hex-conversion functions (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Sat Oct 2 08:36:21 CEST 2010

On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 5:17 AM, Arnon Yaari <wiggin15 at gmail.com> wrote:

Hello again. I submitted two patches to resolve the issues from my first post.

Patch 9951 - implement bytes.hex (http://bugs.python.org/issue9951) Patch 9996 - fix input and output of binascii functions (http://bugs.python.org/issue9996) Fix #1 - patch 9951 implements bytes.hex Fix #2 - this is not fixed for now, no deprecation Fix #3 - this is not fixed for now. I will probably submit another patch if patch 9996 is accepted (create shared conversion functions to be used by both binascii and bytes, maybe) Fix #4 - patch 9996 makes binascii behave correctly in this conversion Fix #5 - same as #4 (strict input and output) As you can see, patch 9996 was rejected and I was referred to this mailing list to continue the discussion.

I actually agree with that rejection. You appear to be thinking of hex coding solely as a data display format, when it is also used fairly often as a data interchange format (usually embedded inside a larger formatting scheme rather than standalone). For data interchange, you want the hex values as ASCII-encoded bytes, for display to the user, you want it as a string.

The conversion of the binascii API to Py3k took a data interchange view of the world, bytes.fromhex is more user I/O oriented.

I would like to hear your thoughts about the backward compatibility issue in patch 9996, and getting patch 9951 commited. Thanks.

The 9951 patch looks pretty good on a quick read through. I put some specific feedback on the tracker.

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia

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