On Wed, Nov 20, 2013 at 11:03 PM, Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> wrote: >> I *will* get confused over which >> direction is encoding and which is decoding. (Removing .decode() >> from the (unicode) str type in 3 does help a lot, if I have a Python 3 >> interpreter running to check against.) > > It took me a long time to learn that text encodes to bytes, and bytes > decode back to text. Using Python 3 really helped with that.
Rule of thumb: Stuff gets encoded for transmission/storage and decoded for usage. That covers encryption (you transmit the coded form and read the decoded), compression (you store the tighter form and use the expanded), Unicode (you store bytes, you work with characters), and quite a few others. I don't know that it's an iron-clad rule (though I can't off-hand think of a contrary example), but it's certainly an easy way to remember a lot of the encode/decode pairs. ChrisA _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com