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Sunday, June 10, 2007

Base64 Encoder/Decoder Updated

Version 1.5 of the Base64 encoding and decoding utility has just been posted. This update corrects a flaw which caused lines in Base64 encoded data written on systems such as Windows which distinguish text and binary files to be written with an end of line sequence consisting of two carriage returns followed by a line feed instead of the prescribed carriage return, line feed pair. While this posed no problem when decoding the file (since white space, including carriage return and line feed characters, is ignored), some text editors would display the encoded files as double spaced, and the redundant carriage returns wasted storage. The update corrects this problem, ending each line with a carriage return and line feed on all systems.

The ready-to-run Windows binary has been re-built with Microsoft Visual C 7.0 (Visual Studio .NET) and, for the first time, the “solution” and “project” files used to build the program are included in the source distribution. The extract from RFC 1341 which documents the Base64 encoding format has been updated to validated XHTML 1.0 and reformatted to improve readability.

Posted at June 10, 2007 23:11