[Python-Dev] bytes.from_hex() [Was: PEP 332 revival in coordination with pep 349?] (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Wed Feb 15 22:48:16 CET 2006

On 2/15/06, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:

Jason Orendorff wrote: > Also the pseudo-encodings ('hex', 'rot13', > 'zip', 'uu', etc.) generally scare me.

Those are not pseudo-encodings, they are regular codecs. It's a common misunderstanding that codecs are only seen as serving the purpose of converting between Unicode and strings. The codec system is deliberately designed to be general enough to also work with many other types, e.g. it is easily possible to write a codec that convert between the hex literal sequence you have above to a list of ordinals:

It's fine that the codec system supports this. However it's questionable that these encodings are invoked using the standard encode() and decode() APIs; and it will be more questionable once encode() returns a bytes object. Methods that return different types depending on the value of an argument are generally a bad idea. (Hence the movement to have separate opentext and openbinary or openbytes functions.)

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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