[Python-Dev] bytes.from_hex() (original) (raw)

Josiah Carlson jcarlson at uci.edu
Sat Feb 18 05:33:16 CET 2006

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

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote: >>>>>>"Guido" == Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> writes: > Guido> - b = bytes(t, enc); t = text(b, enc) > > +1 The coding conversion operation has always felt like a constructor > to me, and in this particular usage that's exactly what it is. I > prefer the nomenclature to reflect that. This also has the advantage that it competely avoids using the verbs "encode" and "decode" and the attendant confusion about which direction they go in. e.g. s = text(b, "base64") makes it obvious that you're going from the binary side to the text side of the base64 conversion.

But you aren't always getting unicode text from the decoding of bytes, and you may be encoding bytes to bytes:

b2 = bytes(b, "base64")
b3 = bytes(b2, "base64")

Which direction are we going again?

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