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

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Fri Mar 3 00:39:16 CET 2006

Ron Adam wrote:

This uses syntax to determine the direction of encoding. It would be easier and clearer to just require two arguments or a tuple.

u = unicode(b, 'encode', 'base64') b = bytes(u, 'decode', 'base64')

The point of the exercise was to avoid using the terms 'encode' and 'decode' entirely, since some people claim to be confused by them.

While I succeeded in that, I concede that the result isn't particularly intuitive and is arguably even more confusing.

If we're going to continue to use 'encode' and 'decode', why not just make them functions:

b = encode(u, 'utf-8') u = decode(b, 'utf-8')

In the case of Unicode encodings, if you get them backwards you'll get a type error.

The advantage of using functions over methods or constructor arguments is that they can be applied uniformly to any input and output types.

-- Greg

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