I made the switch to python 3 about two months ago, and I have to say I love everything about it, *especially* the change to using only bytes and str (no more unicode! or... everything is unicode!) As someone who works with embedded devices, it is great to know what data I am working with.
However, there are times that I do not care what data I am working with, and I find myself writing something like: if isinstance(data, bytes): data = data.decode() This is tedious and breaks the pythonic method of not caring about what your input is. If I expect that my input can always be decoded into valid data, then why do I have to write this? Instead, I would like to propose to add *encode* and *decode* as builtins. I have written simple code to demonstrate my desire: https://gist.github.com/cloudformdesign/d8065a32cdd76d1b3230 There may be a few edge cases I am missing, which would all the more prove my point -- we need a function like this! Basically, if I expect my data to be a string I can just write: data = decode(data) ​Which would accomplish two goals: explicitly stating what I expect of my data, and doing so concisely and cleanly.
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