[Python-Dev] bytes.from_hex()

Sat Feb 18 05:33:16 CET 2006

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?
 - Josiah