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[Python-Dev] bytes.from_hex()

Bob Ippolito bob at redivi.com
Sat Feb 18 06:10:04 CET 2006 
On Feb 17, 2006, at 8:33 PM, Josiah Carlson wrote:

>
> Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
>>
>> Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
>>>>>>>> "Guido" == Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> writes:
>>
>>>     Guido> - b = bytes(t, enc); t = text(b, enc)
>>>
>>> +1  The coding conversion operation has always felt like a  
>>> constructor
>>> to me, and in this particular usage that's exactly what it is.  I
>>> prefer the nomenclature to reflect that.
>>
>> This also has the advantage that it competely
>> avoids using the verbs "encode" and "decode"
>> and the attendant confusion about which direction
>> they go in.
>>
>> e.g.
>>
>>    s = text(b, "base64")
>>
>> makes it obvious that you're going from the
>> binary side to the text side of the base64
>> conversion.
>
> But you aren't always getting *unicode* text from the decoding of  
> bytes,
> and you may be encoding bytes *to* bytes:
>
>     b2 = bytes(b, "base64")
>     b3 = bytes(b2, "base64")
>
> Which direction are we going again?

This is *exactly* why the current set of codecs are INSANE.   
unicode.encode and str.decode should be used *only* for unicode  
codecs.  Byte transforms are entirely different semantically and  
should be some other method pair.

-bob
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