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

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Thu Feb 23 05:23:21 CET 2006

James Y Knight wrote:

Some MIME sections might have a base64 Content-Transfer-Encoding, others might be 8bit encoded, others might be 7bit encoded, others might be quoted- printable encoded.

I stand corrected -- in that situation you would have to encode the characters before combining them with other material.

However, this doesn't change my view that the result of base64 encoding by itself is characters, not bytes. To go straight to bytes would require assuming an encoding, and that would make it harder to use in cases where you wanted a different encoding, because you'd first have to undo the default encoding and then re-encode it using the one you wanted.

It may be reasonable to provide an easy way to go straight from raw bytes to ascii-encoded-base64 bytes, but that should be a different codec. The plain base64 codec should produce text.

-- Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+ University of Canterbury, | Carpe post meridiam! | Christchurch, New Zealand | (I'm not a morning person.) | greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz +--------------------------------------+

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