Two patches have been committed to 3.3 that I am very uncomfortable with. See issue 13637 and issue 13641, respectively.
It seems to me that part of the point of the byte/string split (and the lack of automatic coercion) is to make the programmer be explicit about converting between unicode and bytes. Having these functions, which convert between binary formats (ASCII-only representations of binary data and back) accept unicode strings is reintroducing automatic coercions, and I think it will lead to the same kind of bugs that automatic string coercions yielded in Python2: a program works fine until the input turns out to have non-ASCII data in it, and then it blows up with an unexpected UnicodeError. You can see Antoine's counter arguments in the issue, and I'm sure he'll chime in here. If most people agree with Antoine I won't fight it, but it seems to me that accepting unicode in the binascii and base64 APIs is a bad idea. I'm on vacation this week so I may not be very responsive on this thread, but unless other people agree with me (and will therefore advance the relevant arguments) the thread can die and the patches can stay in. --David _______________________________________________ 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
