News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on UTF-8 Everywhere. Parent comment

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

[ Parent | on HN ]
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]