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

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Tue Apr 23 08:13:53 CEST 2013


Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> - If it is no burden to have to import a module and call an external 
> function for some transformations, why have encode and decode methods at 
> all?

Now that all text strings are unicode, the unicode codecs
are in a sense special, in that you can't do any string
I/O at all without using them at some stage. So arguably
it makes sense to have a very easy way of invoking them.

I suspect that without this, the idea of all strings
being unicode would have been even harder to sell than
it was.

-- 
Greg


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