[issue28927] bytes.fromhex should ignore all whitespace

[Nick Coghlan]

Nick Coghlan added the comment:

Ah, the parallel with base64 decoding and embedding encoded data in multi-line string literals is indeed a compelling one - I'd missed that.

Given that rationale, +1 from me.

Perhaps it would make sense to call that out directly in the documentation? Something like a second example saying:

====
Ignoring all ASCII whitespace provides compatibility with common hexdump formats (like the output of ``xxd``), allowing such data to easily be read from a file or included directly in source code as a multiline string literal::

    >>> bytes.fromhex("""
    ... F0F1F2F3F4
    ... FAFBFCFDFE
    """)
    b'\xf0\xf1\xf2\xf4\xfa\xfb\xfc\xfd'

====

And then a versionchanged note for 3.7 to say that this was switched from filtering out specifically space to filtering out any ASCII whitespace.

My other question would be whether or not a separate issue should be filed to update the bytes-to-bytes "hex" codec to be consistent with this change - at the moment, it doesn't allow whitespace *at all* (not even ASCII spaces), while the base64 decoder is consistent with base64.b64decode and allows it.

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue28927>
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