CodecInfo objects are supposed to have 'encoder' and 'decoder' 
attributes as per http://www.python.org/doc/2.5.2/lib/module-codecs.html 
(naturally, this applies to 2.5.* as well). However, at least the 
CodecInfo object for 'string_escape' names these attributes 'encode' and 
'decode'.

>>> import codecs
>>> dir(codecs.lookup('string_escape'))
['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__dict__', 
'__doc__', '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattribute__', '__getitem__', 
'__getnewargs__', '__getslice__', '__gt__', '__hash__', '__init__', 
'__iter__', '__le__', '__len__', '__lt__', '__module__', '__mul__', 
'__ne__', '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', 
'__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__str__', 'decode', 'encode', 
'incrementaldecoder', 'incrementalencoder', 'name', 'streamreader', 
'streamwriter']

Apparently, it might affect all CodecInfo objects:

class CodecInfo(tuple):

    def __new__(cls, encode, decode, streamreader=None, 
streamwriter=None,
        incrementalencoder=None, incrementaldecoder=None, name=None):
        self = tuple.__new__(cls, (encode, decode, streamreader, 
streamwriter))
        self.name = name
        self.encode = encode
        self.decode = decode
        self.incrementalencoder = incrementalencoder
        self.incrementaldecoder = incrementaldecoder
        self.streamwriter = streamwriter
        self.streamreader = streamreader
        return self
...

Before CodecInfo tuple subclasses were introduced, the lookup() function
used to return a tuple: (encoder, decoder, stream_reader, stream_writer)

See http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0100/

These were normally addressed by position rather than name and still are
in most cases.

I'm not sure whether the choice of attribute names on CodecInfo was done
on purpose or a simple oversight. Walter added them... I've added him on CC.

They do match the names of the methods on codecs, so perhaps we should
just change everything to read encode/decode instead of encoder/decoder ?!

I agree that the documentation should be fixed to read "encode/decode"
instead of "encoder/decoder".

Fixed in r67005 (trunk) and r67006 (pk3k).