[Python-Dev] bytes.from_hex()

[Greg Ewing]

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Doesn't that make base64 non-text by analogy to other "look but don't
> touch" strings like a .gz or vmlinuz?

No, because I can take a piece of base64 encoded data
and use a text editor to manually paste it in with some
other text (e.g. a plain-text (not MIME) mail message).
Then I can mail it to someone, or send it by text-mode
ftp, or translate it from Unix to MSDOS line endings and
give it to a Windows user, or translate it into EBCDIC
and give it to someone who has an IBM mainframe, etc,
etc. And the person at the other end can use their text
editor to manually extract it and decode it and recover
the original data.

I can't do any of those directly with a .gz file or
vmlinuz.

I'm not just making those uses up, BTW. It's not very
long ago people used to do things like that all the
time with uuencode, binhex, etc -- because mail and
news at the time were strictly text channels. They
still are, really -- otherwise we wouldn't be using
anything as hairy as MIME, we'd just mail our binary
files as-is.

--
Greg