>>What about smtplib or smtpd? > >Yes, they should use bytes, I agree. imaplib, poplib and smtplib are wire protocols, and should be 8-bit clean (SMTP in particular). The APIs are little more than the wire protocol, so I think it's apprioriate they present bytes to their users also (and there is nothing in their respective RFC's about encoding).
>as should the email package. That's a tricker case, but I think it should use bytes internally. One of the early goals of email was that be able to cope with malformed MIME - this includes incorrectly encoded messages. So I think it must keep a bytes representation internally. However - charset encoding is part of the MIME spec, so users have a reasonable expectation that the mime lib will present them with unicode. So the API needs to be unicode. >The latter doesn't though, and it needs a lot of work (we tried and failed >at pycon). Yes, it's hard. I think we're going to have to break the API. -- Andrew McNamara, Senior Developer, Object Craft http://www.object-craft.com.au/ _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list Python-3000@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
