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

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Tue Feb 21 10:57:31 CET 2006

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

What I advocate for Python is to require that the standard base64 codec be defined only on bytes, and always produce bytes.

I don't understand that. It seems quite clear to me that base64 encoding (in the general sense of encoding, not the unicode sense) takes binary data (bytes) and produces characters. That's the whole point of base64 -- so you can send arbitrary data over a channel that is only capable of dealing with characters.

So in Py3k the correct usage would be

               base64            unicode
               encode            encode(x)

original bytes --------> unicode ---------> bytes for transmission <-------- <--------- base64 unicode decode decode(x)

where x is whatever unicode encoding the transmission channel uses for characters (probably ascii or an ascii superset, but not necessarily).

So, however it's spelled, the typing is such that

base64_encode(bytes) --> unicode

and

base64_decode(unicode) --> bytes

-- Greg

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