[Python-3000] should rfc822 accept text io or binary io?

[Brett Cannon]

On 8/6/07, Jeremy Hylton <jeremy at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> This is a fairly specific question, but it gets at a more general
> issue I don't fully understand.
>
> I recently updated httplib and urllib so that they work on the struni
> branch.  A recurring problem with these libraries is that they call
> methods like strip() and split().  On a string object, calling these
> methods with no arguments means strip/split whitespace.  The bytes
> object has no corresponding default arguments; whitespace may not be
> well-defined for bytes.  (Or is it?)
> In general, the approach was to read data as bytes off the socket and
> convert header lines to iso-8859-1 before processing them.
>
> test_urllib2_localnet still fails.  One of the problems is that
> BaseHTTPServer doesn't process HTTP responses correctly.  Like
> httplib, it converts the HTTP status line to iso-8859-1.  But it
> parses the rest of the headers by calling mimetools.Message, which is
> really rfc822.Message.  The header lines of an RFC 822 message
> (really, RFC 2822) are ascii, so it should be easy to do the
> conversion.  rfc822.Message assumes it is reading from a text file and
> that readline() returns a string.
>
> So the short question is: Should rfc822.Message require a text io
> object or a binary io object?  Or should it except either (via some
> new constructor or extra arguments to the existing constructor)?  I'm
> not sure how to design an API for bytes vs strings.  The API used to
> be equally well suited for reading from a file or a socket, but they
> don't behave the same way anymore.
>

This really should be redirected as a question for the email package
as rfc822 and mimetools have been deprecated for a while now in favor
of using 'email'.

-Brett