skip wrote: > mal> pickle and marshal would also be a good to have wrapped as codecs. > > Why? They operate on much more than strings. hypergeneralization, of course. more candidates: "10".decode("int") "10.0".decode("float") "[1, 2, 3]".decode("list") "readme.txt".decode("file") "SyntaxError".decode("raise") (etc) Cheers /F