19.10. uu — Encode and decode uuencode files

Source code: Lib/uu.py

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This module encodes and decodes files in uuencode format, allowing arbitrary binary data to be transferred over ASCII-only connections. Wherever a file argument is expected, the methods accept a file-like object. For backwards compatibility, a string containing a pathname is also accepted, and the corresponding file will be opened for reading and writing; the pathname '-' is understood to mean the standard input or output. However, this interface is deprecated; it’s better for the caller to open the file itself, and be sure that, when required, the mode is 'rb' or 'wb' on Windows.

This code was contributed by Lance Ellinghouse, and modified by Jack Jansen.

The uu module defines the following functions:

uu.encode(in_file, out_file, name=None, mode=None)

Uuencode file in_file into file out_file. The uuencoded file will have the header specifying name and mode as the defaults for the results of decoding the file. The default defaults are taken from in_file, or '-' and 0o666 respectively.

uu.decode(in_file, out_file=None, mode=None, quiet=False)

This call decodes uuencoded file in_file placing the result on file out_file. If out_file is a pathname, mode is used to set the permission bits if the file must be created. Defaults for out_file and mode are taken from the uuencode header. However, if the file specified in the header already exists, a uu.Error is raised.

decode() may print a warning to standard error if the input was produced by an incorrect uuencoder and Python could recover from that error. Setting quiet to a true value silences this warning.

exception uu.Error

Subclass of Exception, this can be raised by uu.decode() under various situations, such as described above, but also including a badly formatted header, or truncated input file.

See also

Module binascii

Support module containing ASCII-to-binary and binary-to-ASCII conversions.