[Python-3000] email libraries: use byte or unicode strings?

[Victor Stinner]

Hi,

I worked on poplib, imaplib and nntplib to fix them in Python3. First I tried 
to use unicode everywhere because I love unicode and I don't want to care 
about the charset. So I used a default charset (ISO-8859-1), but it doesn't 
work because each email can use a different charset. The charset is written 
in the email header but I don't want to hack the libraries to parse the 
headers: poplib should only support the POP3 protocol, email parsing is 
complex and should be done by another module (later, after fetching the 
email).

Current status: poplib, imaplib and nntplib are broken

--

I wrote patches for poplib and imaplib to use only byte strings. 
I "backported" poplib tests from python trunk and I used different POP3 and 
IMAP servers to test the libraries.

Can anyone review my patches? Issues #1210 and #3727.

--

I don't know the NNTP protocol and so I'm unable to test it. But nntplib 
should also use byte strings only.

Note: imaplib and nntplib have no test :-(

--

What about smtplib or smtpd?

-- 
Victor Stinner aka haypo
http://www.haypocalc.com/blog/