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A comment on UTF-8 Everywhere. Parent comment

Re:UTF-8 Everywhere by ignoramous on Tuesday April 14, 2020 @04:40PM (#22871155)
> You only need one sentence to explain why ASCII isn't sufficient

Nitpick: ASCII is sufficient when you consider that Base64, despite its 33% overhead from representing 6 bits with 8 bits, makes life easier for certain classes of software.

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Re:UTF-8 Everywhere by TheCoelacanth on Tuesday April 14, 2020 @06:00PM (#22872029)
Base64 is an encoding for representing bytes[0] in ASCII.

That doesn't help you represent text unless you already have an encoding for representing text in bytes (e.g. UTF8).

[0] Octets if you want to be pedantic

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Re:UTF-8 Everywhere by ignoramous on Tuesday April 14, 2020 @06:32PM (#22872303)
What I was alluding to is, I often convert any binary data, including text, to Base64 to avoid dealing with cross platform, cross language, cross format, cross storage, cross network data-handling. Only the layer that needs to deal with the blob's actual string representation needs to worry about encoding schemes that are outside the purview of the humble ASCII table.
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Re:UTF-8 Everywhere by naniwaduni on Tuesday April 14, 2020 @09:44PM (#22873613)
Base64 encodes sextets. The mapping from octets to sextets is mostly settled for set of three octets at a time, but the situation for lengths not divisible by 6 is a mess.
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Re:UTF-8 Everywhere by dtech on Tuesday April 14, 2020 @05:14PM (#22871535)
You still need an encoding to represent non-ASCII characters like ë or 木. Base64 is no help at all there
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