[Python-Dev] Dropping bytes "support" in json

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> This is an interesting question, and something I'm struggling with for
> the email package for 3.x.  It turns out to be pretty convenient to have
> both a bytes and a string API, both for input and output, but I think
> email really wants to be represented internally as bytes.  Maybe.  Or
> maybe just for content bodies and not headers, or maybe both.  Anyway,
> aside from that decision, I haven't come up with an elegant way to allow
> /output/ in both bytes and strings (input is I think theoretically
> easier by sniffing the arguments).

If you allow for content-transfer-encoding: 8bit, I think there is just
no way to represent email as text. You have to accept conversion to,
say, base64 (or quoted-unreadable) when converting an email message to
text.

Regards,
Martin