[Python-3000] base64 - bytes and strings

[Nick Coghlan]

Joe Gregorio wrote:
> Shouldn't it operate more like expat, with the stuff to be
> encoded is bytes and the encoded form is a string?
> It seems more natural if the encoded value is a string since
> base64 encoding is a way of encoding data
> so that it fits in US-ASCII.

Py3k strings are unicode, so returning a string would mean you just have 
to encode it again using the ascii codec to get the bytes to put on the 
wire. Since the base64 module already knows that it is producing ASCII, 
it makes more sense to consider it as a byte->byte encoding.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
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