There are two opposite issues in the bug tracker:
#7475: codecs missing: base64 bz2 hex zlib ...
-> reintroduce the codecs removed from Python3
#8838: Remove codecs.readbuffer_encode()
-> remove the last part of the removed codecs
If I understood correctly, the question is: should codecs module only contain
encoding codecs, or contain also other kind of codecs.
Encoding codec API is now strict (encode: str->bytes, decode: bytes->str),
it's not possible to reuse str.encode() or bytes.decode() for the other
codecs. Marc-Andre Lemburg proposed to add .tranform() and .untranform()
methods to str, bytes and bytearray types. If I understood correctly, it would
look like:
>>> b'abc'.transform("hex")
'616263'
>>> '616263'.untranform("hex")
b'abc'
I suppose that each codec will have a different list of accepted input and
output types. Example:
bz2: encode:bytes->bytes, decode:bytes->bytes
rot13: encode:str->str, decode:str->str
hex: encode:bytes->str, decode: str->bytes
And so "abc".encode("bz2") would raise a TypeError.
--
In my opinion, we should not mix codecs of different kinds (compression,
cipher, etc.) because the input and output types are different. It would have
more sense to create a standard API for each kind of codec. Existing examples
of standard APIs in Python: hashlib, shutil.make_archive(), database API, etc.
--
Victor Stinner
http://www.haypocalc.com/
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