[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 23🔞39 CET 2006

"Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:

M.-A. Lemburg wrote: > Just because some codecs don't fit into the string.decode() > or bytes.encode() scenario doesn't mean that these codecs are > useless or that the methods should be banned.

No. The reason to ban string.decode and bytes.encode is that it confuses users.

How are users confused? bytes.encode CAN only produce bytes. Though string.decode (or bytes.decode) MAY produce strings (or bytes) or unicode, depending on the codec, I think it is quite reasonable to expect that users will understand that string.decode('utf-8') is different than string.decode('base-64'), and that they may produce different output. In a similar fashion, dict.get(1) may produce different results than dict.get(2) for some dictionaries. If some users can't understand this (passing different arguments to a function may produce different output), then I think that some users are broken beyond repair.

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