[Python-Dev] Dropping bytes "support" in json

[James Y Knight]

On Apr 13, 2009, at 10:11 AM, Barry Warsaw wrote:
> The email package does not need a parser for every header, but it  
> should provide a framework that applications (or third party  
> libraries) can use to extend the built-in header parsers.  A bare  
> minimum for functionality requires a Content-Type parser.  I think  
> the email package should also include an address header (Originator,  
> Destination) parser, and a Message-ID header parser.  Possibly others.

Sure, that's fine...

> The default would probably be some unstructured parser for headers  
> like Subject.


But for unknown headers, it's not a useful choice to return a "str"  
object. "str" is just one possible structured data representation for  
a header: there's no correct useful decoding of all headers into str.  
Of course for the "Subject" header, str is the correct result type,  
but that's not a default, that's explicit support for "Subject". You  
can't correctly decode "To" into a str, so what makes you think you  
can decode "X-Gabazaborph" into str?

The only useful and correct representation for unknown (or  
unimplemented) headers is the raw bytes.

James