I understand.

btw; I did a deep dive on cpython codebase, and the only references to codecs.iterencode()/iterdecode() is in ./Lib/tests/test_codecs.py. I suspect functions are not used by many people.

The patch I proposed was a three line change that would allow passing either an int or bytes...not sure if that sways any opinions on this topic.

If we decide to just stick with existing functionality, a small clarification to the docs might be in order?