R. David Murray <rdmur...@bitdance.com> added the comment: Unfortunately we don't have enough history information to determine who wrote the original _bencode function, although very likely it was Barry. As for the test, that seems to have been written during the python3 translation to make sure that the behavior implemented by _bencode was preserved. Python2 has no such test: if you remove the newline check from _bencode, the test suite passes.
Checking with RFC 2045, we find this: The encoded output stream must be represented in lines of no more than 76 characters each. All line breaks or other characters not found in Table 1 must be ignored by decoding software. In base64 data, characters other than those in Table 1, line breaks, and other white space probably indicate a transmission error, about which a warning message or even a message rejection might be appropriate under some circumstances. "All line breaks..." seems pretty unambiguous: an extra trailing newline should be ignored by any compliant email agent. That does not eliminate the possibility that a non-compliant email agent would tack on an extra newline if there is one after the base64 encoded text, but it seems very very unlikely. I am therefore inclined to fix the test, as you suggest. I hope that Barry can remember why _bencode was introduced in the first place, since clearly there was *some* reason. ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue9298> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
