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

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Thu Apr 25 11:25:36 CEST 2013

Le Thu, 25 Apr 2013 08:38:12 +0200, Lennart Regebro <regebro at gmail.com> a écrit :

On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 7:43 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote: > On Thu, 25 Apr 2013 04:19:36 +0200 > Lennart Regebro <regebro at gmail.com> wrote: >> On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 3:54 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull >> <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote: >> > RFC 4648 repeatedly refers to characters, without specifying an >> > encoding for them. > [...] >> >> Base64 is an encoding that transforms between 8-bit streams. > > No, it isn't. What Stephen wrote above.

Yes it is. Base64 takes 8-bit bytes and transforms them into another 8-bit stream that can be safely transmitted over various channels that would mangle an unencoded 8-bit stream, such as email etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64

I don't see anything in that Wikipedia page that validates your opinion. The Wikipedia page does talk about text and characters for the result of base64 encoding.

Besides, I would consider a RFC more authoritative than a Wikipedia definition.

> By the same argument, we should suppress any > encoding which isn't able to represent all possible unicode strings.

No, if you explicitly use such an encoding it is because you need to because you are transferring data to a system that needs the encoding in question. Unicode errors are unavoidable at that point, not an unexpected surprise because a conversion happened implicitly that you didn't know about.

I don't know what "implicit conversion" you are talking about. There's no "implicit conversion" in a scheme where the result of base64 encoding is a text string.

Regards

Antoine.

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