Python’s base64 Module Fails to Decode Unicode Strings
If you’ve got a base64 string as a unicode object and you try to use Python’s base64 module with altchars set, it fails with the following error:
TypeError: character mapping must return integer, None or unicode
This is pretty unhelpful error message also occurs if you try any method that indirectly use altchars. For example:
base64.urlsafe_b64decode(unicode('aass')) base64.b64decode(unicode('aass'),'-_')
both fail while the following works:
base64.urlsafe_b64decode('aass') base64.b64decode(unicode('aass'))
While it’s not complicated to fix it (just convert any unicode string to ascii string), it’s still annoying.
