[Python-Dev] bytes.from_hex()

[Greg Ewing]

Ron Adam wrote:

> While playing around with the example bytes class I noticed code reads 
> much better when I use methods called tounicode and tostring.
> 
>     b64ustring = b.tounicode('base64')
>     b = bytes(b64ustring, 'base64')

I don't like that, because it creates a dependency
(conceptually, at least) between the bytes type and
the unicode type. And why unicode in particular?
Why should it have a tounicode() method, but not
a toint() or tofloat() or tolist() etc.?

> I'm not suggesting we start using to-type everywhere, just where it 
> might make things clearer over decode and encode.

Another thing is that it only works if the codec
transforms between two different types. If you
have a bytes-to-bytes transformation, for example,
then

   b2 = b1.tobytes('some-weird-encoding')

is ambiguous.

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+
University of Canterbury,	   | Carpe post meridiam!          	  |
Christchurch, New Zealand	   | (I'm not a morning person.)          |
greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz	   +--------------------------------------+