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

Aahz aahz at pythoncraft.com
Sat Feb 18 16:32:41 CET 2006

On Sat, Feb 18, 2006, Ron Adam wrote:

I like the bytes.recode() idea a lot. +1 It seems to me it's a far more useful idea than encoding and decoding by overloading and could do both and more. It has a lot of potential to be an intermediate step for encoding as well as being used for many other translations to byte data. I think I would prefer that encode and decode be just functions with well defined names and arguments instead of being methods or arguments to string and Unicode types. I'm not sure on exactly how this would work. Maybe it would need two sets of encodings, ie.. decoders, and encoders. An exception would be given if it wasn't found for the direction one was going in.

Here's an idea I don't think I've seen before:

bytes.recode(b, src_encoding, dest_encoding)

This requires the user to state up-front what the source encoding is. One of the big problems that I see with the whole encoding mess is that so much of it contains implicit assumptions about the source encoding; this gets away from that.

Aahz (aahz at pythoncraft.com) <*> http://www.pythoncraft.com/

"19. A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing." --Alan Perlis

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