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A comment on Key differences between Python 2.7.x and Python 3.x (2014). Parent comment

Re:Key differences between Python 2.7.x and Python 3.x (2014) by macspoofing on Sunday May 07, 2017 @03:01PM (#14286954)
>Base64 encoding returns bytes. Why would anybody _ever_ want that?

What corner case do you think python 3 is solving with the return type being a byte array? Surely you must have looked into it because clearly it isn't arbitrary ... Right?

>The whole purpose of B64 encoding is to make something string-safe

Guess again.

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Re:Key differences between Python 2.7.x and Python 3.x (2014) by Mizza on Sunday May 07, 2017 @03:09PM (#14286998)
From Wikipedia:

"Base64 is a group of similar binary-to-text encoding schemes that represent binary data in an ASCII string format by translating it into a radix-64 representation."

Binary. To. Text. As in - bytes in, text out. Come on now.

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Re:Key differences between Python 2.7.x and Python 3.x (2014) by SmirkingRevenge on Sunday May 07, 2017 @04:27PM (#14287452)
Its intentional, in part because of all the mayhem caused by Python2's "free-spirited" view on whether a thing is bytes or text. And that "free-spirited" view caused A LOT of mayhem.

Python3 errs on the side of not converting bytes to strings or vice versa unless its an explicit conversion on the bytes/string object itself. And it is fan-fucking-tastic!

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