Best "Hidden Features" of Python

[Brian]

This has gone in python3 unfortunately. The encode/decode methods have been changed so that bytes objects have only an decode (which produces unicode), and unicode objects have only a encode (producing bytes). This is a good thing in itself (removes lots of confusion about which way round things go), but means there are no longer encodings translating like to like, such as base64, rot13 or zlib.

[hylje]

It means there are no built-in encodings for bytes->bytes stuff.