[New-bugs-announce] [issue24797] email.header.decode_header return type is not consistent

[Sebastian Kreft]

New submission from Sebastian Kreft:

The return type of email.header.decode_header is not consistent. When there are encoded parts the return type is a list of (bytes, charset or None) (Note that the documentation says it is a list of (str, charset)). However, when there are no encoded parts the return type is [(str, None)]. Note that, at the end of the function, there is a routine that converts everything to bytes.

Compare:
In [01]: email.header.decode_header('=?UTF-8?Q?foo?=bar')
Out[01]: [(b'foo', 'utf-8'), (b'bar', None)]

In [02]: email.header.decode_header('foobar')
Out[02]: [('foobar', None)]

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messages: 248047
nosy: Sebastian Kreft
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: email.header.decode_header return type is not consistent
versions: Python 3.4, Python 3.5, Python 3.6

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue24797>
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