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

Oleg Broytman phd at phdru.name
Mon Apr 22 16:25:50 CEST 2013


On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 09:50:14AM -0400, Devin Jeanpierre <jeanpierreda at gmail.com> wrote:
> unicode_escape doesn't make any sense anymore -- python code is text,
> not bytes, so why does 'abc'.encode('unicode_escape') return bytes?

   AFAIU the situation is simple: unicode.encode(encoding) returns
bytes, bytes.decode(encoding) returns unicode, and neither
unicode.decode() nor bytes.encode() exist.
   Transformations like base64 and bz2 are nor encoding/decoding -- they
are bytes/bytes or unicode/unicode transformations.

Oleg.
-- 
     Oleg Broytman            http://phdru.name/            phd at phdru.name
           Programmers don't die, they just GOSUB without RETURN.


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