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. Stephen is correct that you could decide you don't care about those semantics, and implement base64 encoding as a bytes -> str decoding then requiring a re-encoding (to ascii) before wire transmission. The clarity of the interface (or lack thereof) would probably make users want to send a strongly worded letter to whoever implemented it though, I don't think `data.decode('base64').encode('ascii')` would fit the "obviousness" or "readability" expectations of most users.