[Python-Dev] Why can't I encode/decode base64 without importing a module? (original) (raw)

Lennart Regebro regebro at gmail.com
Thu Apr 25 08:38:12 CEST 2013

On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 7:43 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

On Thu, 25 Apr 2013 04:19:36 +0200 Lennart Regebro <regebro at gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 3:54 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote: > RFC 4648 repeatedly refers to characters, without specifying an > encoding for them. [...]

Base64 is an encoding that transforms between 8-bit streams. No, it isn't. What Stephen wrote above.

Yes it is. Base64 takes 8-bit bytes and transforms them into another 8-bit stream that can be safely transmitted over various channels that would mangle an unencoded 8-bit stream, such as email etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64

Either you get a "LookupError: unknown encoding: base64", which is what you get now, or you get an UnicodeEncodingError if the text is not ASCII. We don't want the latter, because it means that code that looks fine for the developer breaks in real life because the developer was American That's bogus.

No, that's real life.

By the same argument, we should suppress any encoding which isn't able to represent all possible unicode strings.

No, if you explicitly use such an encoding it is because you need to because you are transferring data to a system that needs the encoding in question. Unicode errors are unavoidable at that point, not an unexpected surprise because a conversion happened implicitly that you didn't know about.

//Lennart

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