R. David Murray wrote:
The fundamental purpose of the base64 encoding is to take a series of arbitrary bytes and reversibly turn them into another series of bytes in which the eighth bit is not significant.
No, it's not. If that were its only purpose, it would be called base128, and the RFC would describe it purely in terms of bit patterns and not mention characters or character sets at all. The RFC does *not* do that. It describes the output in terms of characters, and does not specify any bit patterns for the output. The intention is clearly to represent binary data as *text*. -- Greg _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
