Aurelien Bompard writes:

I'm really interested in any insight on this issue. Thanks for reading all that :-)

RFC 2047 and RFC 2231 should be treated as wire protocol, and handled at the bytes level. I haven't looked at this in a while, but I'm pretty sure Python 3's email module does this correctly.

I would say that the routines that do this decoding should return bytes, and there should be called by the get() and __getitem__() methods.

I don't have time to take a close look at the code until the weekend at least.

Steve