[Python-3000] base64 - bytes and strings

[Greg Ewing]

Martin v. Löwis wrote:
> The point that proponents of "base64 encoding should
> yield strings" miss is that US-ASCII is *both* a character set,
> and an encoding.

Last time we discussed this, I went and looked at the
RFC where base64 is defined. According to my reading of
it, nowhere does it say that base64 output must be
encoded as US-ASCII, nor any other particular encoding.

It *does* say that the characters used were chosen because
they are present in a number of different character sets
in use at the time, and explicity mentions EBCDIC as one
of those character sets.

To me this quite clearly says that base64 is defined at
the level of characters, not encodings.

--
Greg