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

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Thu Apr 25 14:57:45 CEST 2013

Le Thu, 25 Apr 2013 12:05:01 +0200, Lennart Regebro <regebro at gmail.com> a écrit :

> The Wikipedia page does talk about text and characters for > the result of base64 encoding.

So are saying that you want the Python implementation of base64 encoding to take 8-bit binary data in bytes format and return a Unicode string containing the Base64 encoded data?

I'm not wanting anything here, since that would clearly break backwards compatibility. But I think binascii should have gone that way in Python 3, indeed. binascii.b2a_hex(), for example, would be much more practical if it returned str, rather than bytes.

Python 3 still views text as Unicode only.

Python 3 doesn't view text as unicode, it represents it as unicode. That is, unicode is the character set that Python 3 is able to represent in the canonical text type, str. If you ever encounter a hypothetical text that uses characters outside of Unicode (obviously it will be encoded using a non-unicode encoding :-)), then you can't represent it as a str.

And base64 is clearly representable as unicode, since it's representable using the ASCII character set (which is a subset of the unicode character set).

I can't think of any usecase where you would want base64 encoded data unless you intend to transmit it over an 8-bit channel,

I can think of many usecases where I want to embed base64-encoded data in a larger text before encoding that text and transmitting it over a 8-bit channel.

(GPG signatures, binary data embedded in JSON objects, etc.)

Regards

Antoine.

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