On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 2:57 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solip...@pitrou.net> wrote: > I can think of many usecases where I want to *embed* base64-encoded > data in a larger text *before* encoding that text and transmitting > it over a 8-bit channel.
That still doesn't mean that this should be the default behavior. Just because you *can* represent base64 as Unicode text doesn't mean that it should be. > (GPG signatures, binary data embedded in JSON objects, etc.) Is the GPG signature calculated on the *Unicode* data? How is that done? Isn't it done on the encoded message? As I understand it a GPG signature is done on any sort of document. Either me or you have completely misunderstood how GPG works, I think. :-) In the case of JSON objects, they are intended for data exchange, and hence in the end need to be byte strings. So if you have a byte string you want to base64 encode before transmitting it with json, you would just end up transforming it to a unicode string and then back. That doesn't seem useful. One use case where you clearly *do* want the base64 encoded data to be unicode strings is because you want to embed it in a text discussing base64 strings, for a blog or a book or something. That doesn't seem to be a very common usecase. For the most part you base64 encode things because it's going to be transmitted, and hence the natural result of a base64 encoding should be data that is ready to be transmitted, hence byte strings, and not Unicode strings. > Python 3 doesn't *view* text as unicode, it *represents* it as unicode. I don't agree that there is a significant difference between those wordings in this context. The end result is the same: Things intended to be handled/seen as textual should be unicode strings, things intended for data exchange should be byte strings. Something that is base64 encoded is primarily intended for data exchange. A base64 encoding should therefore return byte strings, especially since most API's that perform this transmission will take byte strings as input. If you want to include this in textual data, for whatever reason, like printing it in a book, then the conversion is trivial, but that is clearly the less common use case, and should therefore not be the default behavior. //Lennart _______________________________________________ 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