[Python-Dev] Why can't I encode/decode base64 without importing a module? (original) (raw)
Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Wed Apr 24 01:19:44 CEST 2013
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Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
By RFC specification, BASE64 is a textual representation of arbitrary binary data. (Cf. URIs.) The natural interpretation of .encode('base64') in that context would be as a bytes-to-text encoder. However, ... In practice, we invariably use an ASCII octet stream to carry BASE64- encoded data.
As an aside, if we'd had the flexible string representation sooner, this needn't have been such a big problem. With it, the base64 encoder could return a unicode string with 8-bit representation, which could then be turned into an ascii byte string with negligible overhead.
Web developers might grumble about the need for an extra call, but they can no longer claim it would kill the performance of their web server.
-- Greg
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