[Python-Dev] bytes.from_hex()

[Greg Ewing]

James Y Knight wrote:

> Some MIME  sections 
> might have a base64 Content-Transfer-Encoding, others might  be 8bit 
> encoded, others might be 7bit encoded, others might be quoted- printable 
> encoded.

I stand corrected -- in that situation you would have to encode
the characters before combining them with other material.

However, this doesn't change my view that the result of base64
encoding by itself is characters, not bytes. To go straight
to bytes would require assuming an encoding, and that would
make it *harder* to use in cases where you wanted a different
encoding, because you'd first have to undo the default
encoding and then re-encode it using the one you wanted.

It may be reasonable to provide an easy way to go straight
from raw bytes to ascii-encoded-base64 bytes, but that should
be a different codec. The plain base64 codec should produce
text.

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+
University of Canterbury,	   | Carpe post meridiam!          	  |
Christchurch, New Zealand	   | (I'm not a morning person.)          |
greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz	   +--------------------------------------+