[issue4770] binascii module, crazy error messages, unexpected behavior

[Marc-Andre Lemburg]

Marc-Andre Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> added the comment:

flox wrote:
> 
> flox <laxyf at yahoo.fr> added the comment:
> 
>> Are you sure that this patch is correct (which RFC says
>> that quoted printable should use our raw-unicode-escape
>> codec ?):
> 
> I am not sure of anything. It is an "educated guess" at the most.
> Since 'base64' and 'x-uuencode' both use 'raw-unicode-escape'...

Quoted printable as well as the other two transfer encodings should
be encodings that "fit" into the 7-bit ASCII default originally
assumed for email messages, so 'ascii' appears to be the more
natural choice.

The choice of 'raw-unicode-escape' will cause strange error
messages or hide errors, since it encodes non-ASCII code points
using '\xNN' which these codecs don't supports:

b''
>>> base64.b64decode('äöü'.encode('ascii'))
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 0-2: ordinal not in range(128)

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue4770>
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