[Python-Dev] Reintroduce or drop completly hex, bz2, rot13, ... codecs

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Wed, 9 Jun 2010 13:57:05 +0200
Dirkjan Ochtman <dirkjan at ochtman.nl> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 13:40, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
> > No, I don't think so. If I'm using hex "encoding", it's because I want
> > to see a text representation of some arbitrary bytestring (in order to
> > display it inside another piece of text, for example).
> > In other words, the purpose of hex is precisely to give a textual
> > display of non-textual data.
> 
> Or I want to encode binary data in a non-binary-safe protocol, in
> which case I probably want bytes.

In this case you would probably choose a more space-efficient
representation, such as base64 or base85.  Which is why I think the
purpose of hex is mostly for textual representation.

Regards

Antoine.