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

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Sun Feb 19 17:21:59 CET 2006

"Josiah" == Josiah Carlson <jcarlson at uci.edu> writes:

Josiah> The question remains: is str.decode() returning a string
Josiah> or unicode depending on the argument passed, when the
Josiah> argument quite literally names the codec involved,
Josiah> difficult to understand?  I don't believe so; am I the
Josiah> only one?

Do you do any of the user education about codec use that you recommend? The people I try to teach about coding invariably find it difficult to understand. The problem is that the near-universal intuition is that for "human-usable text" is pretty much anything but Unicode will do. This is a really hard block to get them past. There is very good reason why Unicode is plain text ("original" in MAL's terms) and everything else is encoded ("derived"), but students new to the concept often take a while to "get" it.

Maybe it's just me, but whether it's the teacher or the students, I am not excited about the education route. Martin's simple rule is simple, and the exceptions for using a "nonexistent" method mean I don't have to reinforce---the students will be able to teach each other. The exceptions also directly help reinforce the notion that text == Unicode.

I grant the point that .decode('base64') is useful, but I also believe that "education" is a lot more easily said than done in this case.

-- School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.

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