You're right, it's ugly. I wonder if it makes more sense to change the makefile() call to use 'r' for the mode, and adjust the various put* methods to convert their argument to bytes?  We could use "ASCII", "Latin-1" or "UTF-8" for encoding, I don't really know if there are ftp servers that do anything with non-ASCII characters or encodings.  Maybe adding the encoding as an option would be useful.