Common
Binary-to-text encoding
Representation of binary data as text
Binary-to-text encoding
A binary-to-text encoding is a data encoding scheme that represents binary data as plain text. Generally, the binary data consists of a sequence of arbitrary 8-bit byte (a.k.a. octet) values and the text is restricted to the printable character codes of commonly-used character encodings such as ASCII. In general, arbitrary binary data contains values that are not printable character codes, so software designed to only handle text fails to process such data. Encoding binary data as text allows information that is not inherently stored as text to be processed by software that otherwise cannot process arbitrary binary data. The software cannot interpret the information, but it can perform useful operations on the data such as transmit and store. PGP documentation (RFC 9580) uses the term "ASCII armor" for binary-to-text encoding when referring to Base64. Conceptually, binary-to-text encoding differs from numeric representation for a numeric base (radix). For example, decimal is a scheme for...
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