[Python-Dev] Why can't I encode/decode base64 without importing a module?
Lennart Regebro
regebro at gmail.com
Thu Apr 25 09:03:08 CEST 2013
On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 8:57 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:
> I think that would be an unfortunate result. These operations on
> streams are theoretically nicely composable. It would be nice if
> practice reflected that by having a uniform API for all of these
> operations (charset translation, encoded text to internal, content
> transfer encoding, compression ...). I think it would be useful, too,
> though I can't prove that.
But the translation to and from Unicode to some 8-bit encoding is
different from the others. It makes sense that they have a different
API. If you have a Unicode string you can go:
Unicode text -> UTF8 -> ZIP -> BASE64.
Or you can go
Unicode text -> UTF8 -> BASE64 -> ZIP
Although admittedly that makes much less sense. :-)
But you can not go:
Unicode text -> BASE64 -> ZIP -> UTF8
The str/bytes encoding/decoding is not like the others.
//Lennart
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