[Python-Dev] email package status in 3.X

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Michael Urman writes:

 > It is somewhat troublesome that there doesn't appear to be an obvious
 > built-in idempotent-when-possible function that gives back the
 > provided bytes/str,

If you want something idempotent, it's already the case that
bytes(b'abc') => b'abc'.  What might be desirable is to make
bytes('abc') work and return b'abc', but only if 'abc' is pure ASCII
(or maybe ISO 8859/1).

Unfortunately, str(b'abc') already does work, but

steve at uwakimon ~ $ python3.1
Python 3.1.2 (release31-maint, May 12 2010, 20:15:06) 
[GCC 4.3.4] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> str(b'abc')
"b'abc'"
>>> 

Oops.  You can see why that probably "should" be the case.