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

Josiah Carlson jcarlson at uci.edu
Fri Feb 17 23:18:39 CET 2006


"Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:
> M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
> > Just because some codecs don't fit into the string.decode()
> > or bytes.encode() scenario doesn't mean that these codecs are
> > useless or that the methods should be banned.
> 
> No. The reason to ban string.decode and bytes.encode is that
> it confuses users.

How are users confused?  bytes.encode CAN only produce bytes.  Though
string.decode (or bytes.decode) MAY produce strings (or bytes) or
unicode, depending on the codec, I think it is quite reasonable to
expect that users will understand that string.decode('utf-8') is
different than string.decode('base-64'), and that they may produce
different output.  In a similar fashion, dict.get(1) may produce
different results than dict.get(2) for some dictionaries.  If some users
can't understand this (passing different arguments to a function may
produce different output), then I think that some users are broken
beyond repair.

 - Josiah



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