On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 4:57 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <step...@xemacs.org> wrote: > Lennart Regebro writes: > > > Base64 is an encoding that transforms between 8-bit streams. Let it be > > that. Don't try to shoehorn it into a completely different kind of > > encoding. > > By "completely different kind of encoding" do you mean "codec"? > > 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. > > Anyway, this discussion belongs on python-ideas at this point. Or > would, if I had an idea about implementation. I'll take it there when > I do have something to say about implementation.
Bringing the mailing list thread up to date with the state of the relevant tracker issues: I created http://bugs.python.org/issue17827 to cover adding the missing documentation for "codecs.encode" and "codecs.decode" as the officially supported solutions for easy use of the codec infrastructure *without* the additional text model specific input and output type restrictions imposed by the str.encode, bytes.decode and bytearray.decode methods. I created http://bugs.python.org/issue17828 to cover emitting more meaningful exceptions when a codec throws TypeError or ValueError, as well as when the additional type checking fails for str.encode, bytes.decode and bytearray.decode. I created http://bugs.python.org/issue17839 to cover the fact that part of the problem here is that the base64 module currently only accepts bytes and bytearray as inputs, rather than anything that supports the PEP 3118 buffer interface. http://bugs.python.org/issue7475 (linked earlier in the thread) is now strictly about restoring the shorthand aliases for "base64_codec", "bz2_codec" et al that were removed in http://bugs.python.org/issue10807. Regards, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncogh...@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia _______________________________________________ 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