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

Josiah Carlson jcarlson at uci.edu
Fri Feb 17 06:20:30 CET 2006

Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:

Josiah Carlson wrote: > They may not be encodings of unicode data, But if they're not encodings of unicode data, what business do they have being available through someunicodestring.encode(...)?

I had always presumed that bytes objects are going to be able to be a source for encode AND decode, like current non-unicode strings are able to be today. In that sense, if I have a bytes object which is an encoding of rot13, hex, uu, etc., or I have a bytes object which I would like to be in one of those encodings, I should be able to do b.encode(...) or b.decode(...), given that 'b' is a bytes object.

Are 'encodings' going to become a mechanism to encode and decode unicode strings, rather than a mechanism to encode and decode text and data strings? That would seem like a backwards step to me, as the email package would need to package their own base-64 encode/decode API and implementation, and similarly for any other package which uses any one of the encodings already available.

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