[Python-3000] should rfc822 accept text io or binary io?

Fri Aug 17 22:54:38 CEST 2007

> Ideally, the package would be well suited not only for wire-to-wire
> and all-internal uses, but also related domains like HTTP and other
> RFC 2822-like contexts.

But that's exactly why the internal representation should be bytes,
not strings. HTTP's use of MIME, for instance, uses "binary" quite a
lot.
> Internally though, I feel fairly strongly that an email 
> message should be represented as strings, though sometimes (certainly 
> for idempotency) you still need to carry around the charset (i.e.
> encoding).

What if you've got a PNG as one of the multipart components? With a
Content-Transfer-Encoding of "binary"? There's no way to represent that
as a string.
I wonder if we're misunderstanding each other here. The "mail
message" itself is essentially a binary data structure, not a sequence
of strings, though many of its fields consist of carefully specified
string values. Is that what you're saying? That when decoding the
message, the fields which are string-valued should be kept as strings
in the internal Python representation of the message?
Bill