[Python-Dev] bytes.from_hex()

[Bob Ippolito]

On Feb 20, 2006, at 7:25 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

>>>>>> "Martin" == Martin v Löwis <martin at v.loewis.de> writes:
>
>     Martin> Please do take a look. It is the only way: If you were to
>     Martin> embed base64 *bytes* into character data content of an XML
>     Martin> element, the resulting XML file might not be well-formed
>     Martin> anymore (if the encoding of the XML file is not an ASCII
>     Martin> superencoding).
>
> Excuse me, I've been doing category theory recently.  By "embedding" I
> mean a map from an intermediate object which is a stream of bytes to
> the corresponding stream of characters.  In the case of UTF-16-coded
> characters, this would necessarily imply a representation change, as
> you say.
>
> What I advocate for Python is to require that the standard base64
> codec be defined only on bytes, and always produce bytes.  Any
> representation change should be done explicitly.  This is surely
> conformant with RFC 2045's definition and with RFC 3548.

+1

-bob