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

Ian Bicking ianb at colorstudy.com
Sat Feb 18 01:06:13 CET 2006

Martin v. Löwis wrote:

Ian Bicking wrote:

That str.encode(unicodeencoding) implicitly decodes strings seems like a flaw in the unicode encodings, quite seperate from the existance of str.encode. I for one really like s.encode('zlib').encode('base64') -- and if the zlib encoding raised an error when it was passed a unicode object (instead of implicitly encoding the string with the ascii encoding) that would be fine.

The pipe-like nature of .encode and .decode works very nicely for certain transformations, applicable to both unicode and byte objects. Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. The way you use it, it's a matter of notation only: why is zlib(base64(s)) any worse? I think it's better: it doesn't use string literals to denote function names.

Maybe it isn't worse, but the real alternative is:

import zlib import base64

base64.b64encode(zlib.compress(s))

Encodings cover up eclectic interfaces, where those interfaces fit a basic pattern -- data in, data out.

-- Ian Bicking / ianb at colorstudy.com / http://blog.ianbicking.org

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list