[Python-Dev] Why can't I encode/decode base64 without importing a module? (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Tue Apr 23 08:13:53 CEST 2013


Steven D'Aprano wrote:

- If it is no burden to have to import a module and call an external function for some transformations, why have encode and decode methods at all?

Now that all text strings are unicode, the unicode codecs are in a sense special, in that you can't do any string I/O at all without using them at some stage. So arguably it makes sense to have a very easy way of invoking them.

I suspect that without this, the idea of all strings being unicode would have been even harder to sell than it was.

-- Greg



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