[Python-Dev] Why can't I encode/decode base64 without importing a module?

Ram Rachum ram at rachum.com
Mon Apr 22 13:29:23 CEST 2013


Hi everyone,

Take a look at this question:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16122435/python-3-how-do-i-use-bytes-to-bytes-and-string-to-string-encodings/16122472?noredirect=1#comment23034787_16122472

Is there really no way to use base64 that's as short as:

    b'whatever'.encode('base64')

Because doing this:

    import codecs
    codecs.decode(b"whatever", "base64_codec")

Or this:

    import base64
    encoded = base64.b64encode(b'whatever')

Is cumbersome!

Why can't I do something like b'whatever'.encode('base64')? Or maybe using
a different method than `encode`?


Thanks,
Ram.
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