[Python-Dev] bytes.from_hex() [Was: PEP 332 revival in coordination with pep 349?]

[Jason Orendorff]

Instead of byte literals, how about a classmethod bytes.from_hex(), which
works like this:

  # two equivalent things
  expected_md5_hash = bytes.from_hex('5c535024cac5199153e3834fe5c92e6a')
  expected_md5_hash = bytes([92, 83, 80, 36, 202, 197, 25, 145, 83, 227,
131, 79, 229, 201, 46, 106])

It's just a nicety; the former fits my brain a little better.  This would
work fine both in 2.5 and in 3.0.

I thought about unicode.encode('hex'), but obviously it will continue to
return a str in 2.x, not bytes.  Also the pseudo-encodings ('hex', 'rot13',
'zip', 'uu', etc.) generally scare me.  And now that bytes and text are
going to be two very different types, they're even weirder than before.
Consider:

  text.encode('utf-8') ==> bytes
  text.encode('rot13') ==> text
  bytes.encode('zip') ==> bytes
  bytes.encode('uu') ==> text (?)

This state of affairs seems kind of crazy to me.

Actually users trying to figure out Unicode would probably be better served
if bytes.encode() and text.decode() did not exist.

-j
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