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

[Barry Warsaw]

On Apr 9, 2009, at 2:25 PM, Martin v. Löwis wrote:

>> 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.

Agreed.  But applications will want to deal with some parts of the  
message as text on the boundaries.  Internally, it should be all bytes  
(although even that is a pain to write ;).

-Barry

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