On Thu, Apr 09, 2009, Barry Warsaw wrote: > > So, what I'm really asking is this. Let's say you agree that there are > use cases for accessing a header value as either the raw encoded bytes or > the decoded unicode. What should this return: > > >>> message['Subject'] > > The raw bytes or the decoded unicode?
Let's make that the raw bytes by default -- we can add a parameter to Message() to specify that the default where possible is unicode for returned values, if that isn't too painful. Here's my reasoning: ultimately, everyone NEEDS to understand that the underlying transport for e-mail is bytes (similar to sockets). We do people no favors by pasting over this too much. We can overlay convenience at various points, but except for text payloads, everything should be bytes by default. Even for text payloads, I'm not entirely certain the default shouldn't be bytes: consider an HTML attachment that you want to compare against the output from a webserver. Still, as long as it's easy to get bytes for text payloads, I think overall I'm still leaning toward unicode for them. -- Aahz (a...@pythoncraft.com) <*> http://www.pythoncraft.com/ Why is this newsgroup different from all other newsgroups? _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
