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

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Thu Apr 25 14:38:31 CEST 2013

Le Thu, 25 Apr 2013 12:46:43 +0200, Xavier Morel <catch-all at masklinn.net> a écrit :

On 2013-04-25, at 11:25 , Antoine Pitrou wrote: > > Besides, I would consider a RFC more authoritative than a > Wikipedia definition.

> Base encoding of data is used in many situations to store or > transfer data in environments that, perhaps for legacy reasons, are > restricted to US-ASCII [1] data. so the output is US-ASCII data, a byte stream.

Well, depending on the context, US-ASCII can be a character set or a character encoding. If some specification is talking about text and characters, then it is something that can reasonably be a str in Python land.

Similarly, we have chosen to make filesystem paths str by default in Python 3, even though many Unix-heads would claim that filesystem paths are "bytes only". The reason is that while they are technically bytes (under Unix), they are functionally text.

Now, if the base64-encoded data is your entire payload, this clearly amounts to nitpicking. But when you want to embed that data in some larger chunk of text (e.g. a JSON object), then it makes a lot of sense to consider the base64-encoded data a piece of text, not bytes.

Regards

Antoine.

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