On Apr 13, 2009, at 10:11 AM, Barry Warsaw wrote:
The email package does not need a parser for every header, but it should provide a framework that applications (or third party libraries) can use to extend the built-in header parsers. A bare minimum for functionality requires a Content-Type parser. I think the email package should also include an address header (Originator, Destination) parser, and a Message-ID header parser. Possibly others.
Sure, that's fine...
The default would probably be some unstructured parser for headers like Subject.
But for unknown headers, it's not a useful choice to return a "str" object. "str" is just one possible structured data representation for a header: there's no correct useful decoding of all headers into str. Of course for the "Subject" header, str is the correct result type, but that's not a default, that's explicit support for "Subject". You can't correctly decode "To" into a str, so what makes you think you can decode "X-Gabazaborph" into str?
The only useful and correct representation for unknown (or unimplemented) headers is the raw bytes.
James _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
