[issue3532] bytes.tohex method

[Martin v. Löwis]

Martin v. Löwis <martin at v.loewis.de> added the comment:

> * However, it is *very* obscure. I've been using Python for a year and I
> didn't know about it.

Hmm. There are probably many modules that you haven't used yet.

> * And, it requires importing binascii.

So what? The desire to convert bytes into hex strings is infrequent
enough to leave it out of the realm of a method. Also, Guido has
pronounced that he prefers functions over methods (and in this case,
I agree)

Using functions is more extensible. If you wanted to produce base-85
(say), then you can extend the functionality of bytes by providing a
function that does that, whereas you can't extend the existing bytes
type.

> * And, it results in a bytes object, not a str. That's weird. (Perhaps
> it would be good idea to change the functions in the binascii module to
> output strings instead of bytes? Ostensibly it looks like this module
> hasn't undergone py3kification).

There has been endless debates on this (or, something similar to this),
revolving around the question: "is base-64 text or binary"?

> Would it hurt to have the tohex method of the bytes object to perform
> this task as well?

IMO, yes, it would. It complicates the code, and draws the focus away
from the proper approach to data conversion (namely, functions - not
methods).

> It would be much nicer to use since it's a method of
> the object rather than having to find out about and import and use some
> function.

That's highly debatable.

> Also why have a bytes.fromhex method when you could use binascii.unhexlify?

Good point.

In any case, this is my opion; feel free to discuss this on python-dev.

Very clearly it is too late to add this for 3.0 now.

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue3532>
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