Le Thu, 25 Apr 2013 12:46:43 +0200, Xavier Morel <catch-all@masklinn.net> a écrit :
On 2013-04-25, at 11:25 , Antoine Pitrou wrote:
Besides, I would consider a RFC more authoritative than a Wikipedia definition.
Base encoding of data is used in many situations to store or transfer data in environments that, perhaps for legacy reasons, are restricted to US-ASCII [1] data.
so the output is US-ASCII data, a byte stream.
Well, depending on the context, US-ASCII can be a character set or a character encoding. If some specification is talking about text and characters, then it is something that can reasonably be a str in Python land. Similarly, we have chosen to make filesystem paths str by default in Python 3, even though many Unix-heads would claim that filesystem paths are "bytes only". The reason is that while they are technically bytes (under Unix), they are functionally text. Now, if the base64-encoded data is your entire payload, this clearly amounts to nitpicking. But when you want to *embed* that data in some larger chunk of text (e.g. a JSON object), then it makes a lot of sense to consider the base64-encoded data a piece of *text*, not bytes. Regards Antoine.