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

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Sat Mar 4 00:46:56 CET 2006

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

Doesn't that make base64 non-text by analogy to other "look but don't touch" strings like a .gz or vmlinuz?

No, because I can take a piece of base64 encoded data and use a text editor to manually paste it in with some other text (e.g. a plain-text (not MIME) mail message). Then I can mail it to someone, or send it by text-mode ftp, or translate it from Unix to MSDOS line endings and give it to a Windows user, or translate it into EBCDIC and give it to someone who has an IBM mainframe, etc, etc. And the person at the other end can use their text editor to manually extract it and decode it and recover the original data.

I can't do any of those directly with a .gz file or vmlinuz.

I'm not just making those uses up, BTW. It's not very long ago people used to do things like that all the time with uuencode, binhex, etc -- because mail and news at the time were strictly text channels. They still are, really -- otherwise we wouldn't be using anything as hairy as MIME, we'd just mail our binary files as-is.

-- Greg

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