[Python-Dev] accept string in a2b and base64?

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Nick Coghlan wrote:
> The reason Python 2's implicit str<->unicode conversions are so
> problematic isn't just because they're implicit: it's because they
> effectively assume *latin-1* as the encoding on the 8-bit str side.

The implicit conversion in Python2 only works with ASCII content,
pretty much like what you describe here.

Note that e.g. UTF-16 is not an ASCII super set, but the ASCII
assumption still works:

>>> u'abc'.encode('utf-16-le').decode('ascii')
u'a\x00b\x00c\x00'

Apart from that nit (which can be resolved in most cases by
disallowing 0 bytes), I still believe that the Python2 implicit
conversion between Unicode and 8-bit strings is a very useful
feature in practice.

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