New submission from David M. Beazley <beaz...@users.sourceforge.net>:
The whole point of base64 encoding is to safely encode binary data into
text characters. Thus, the base64.b64decode() function should equally
accept text strings or binary strings as input. For example, there is a
reasonable expectation that something like this should work:
>>> x = 'SGVsbG8='
>>> base64.b64decode(x)
b'Hello'
>>>
In Python 3, you get this exception however:
>>> base64.b64decode(x)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "/tmp/lib/python3.0/base64.py", line 80, in b64decode
raise TypeError("expected bytes, not %s" % s.__class__.__name__)
TypeError: expected bytes, not str
>>>
I realize that there are encoding issues with Unicode strings, but
base64 encodes everything into the first 127 ASCII characters. If the
input to b64decode is a str, just do a encode('ascii') operation on it
and proceed. If that fails, it wasn't valid Base64 to begin with.
I can't think of any real negative impact to making this change as long
as the result is still always bytes. The main benefit is just
simplifying the decoding process for end-users.
See issue 4768.
----------
components: Library (Lib)
messages: 78466
nosy: beazley
severity: normal
status: open
title: b64decode should accept strings or bytes
type: behavior
versions: Python 3.0
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Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue4769>
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