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词条 Binary-to-text encoding
释义

  1. Description

  2. Encoding plain text

  3. Encoding standards

  4. Notes

  5. References

{{Multiple issues|{{original research|date=April 2010}}{{refimprove|date=December 2012}}
}}{{anchor|ASCII armor}}

A binary-to-text encoding is encoding of data in plain text. More precisely, it is an encoding of binary data in a sequence of printable characters. These encodings are necessary for transmission of data when the channel does not allow binary data (such as email or NNTP) or is not 8-bit clean. PGP documentation ({{IETF RFC|4880}}) uses the term ASCII armor for binary-to-text encoding when referring to Base64.

Description

The ASCII text-encoding standard uses 128 unique values (0–127) to represent the alphabetic, numeric, and punctuation characters commonly used in English, plus a selection of control codes which do not represent printable characters. For example, the capital letter A is ASCII character 65, the numeral 2 is ASCII 50, the character } is ASCII 125, and the metacharacter carriage return is ASCII 13. Systems based on ASCII use seven bits to represent these values digitally.

In contrast, most computers store data in memory organized in eight-bit bytes. Files that contain machine-executable code and non-textual data typically contain all 256 possible eight-bit byte values. Many computer programs came to rely on this distinction between seven-bit text and eight-bit binary data, and would not function properly if non-ASCII characters appeared in data that was expected to include only ASCII text. For example, if the value of the eighth bit is not preserved, the program might interpret a byte value above 127 as a flag telling it to perform some function.

It is often desirable, however, to be able to send non-textual data through text-based systems, such as when one might attach an image file to an e-mail message. To accomplish this, the data is encoded in some way, such that eight-bit data is encoded into seven-bit ASCII characters (generally using only alphanumeric and punctuation characters—the ASCII printable characters). Upon safe arrival at its destination, it is then decoded back to its eight-bit form. This process is referred to as binary to text encoding. Many programs perform this conversion to allow for data-transport, such as PGP and GNU Privacy Guard (GPG).

Encoding plain text

Binary-to-text encoding methods are also used as a mechanism for encoding plain text. For example:

  • Some systems have a more limited character set they can handle; not only are they not 8-bit clean, some cannot even handle every printable ASCII character.
  • Other systems have limits on the number of characters that may appear between line breaks, such as the "1000 characters per line" limit of some SMTP software, as allowed by {{IETF RFC|2821}}.
  • Still others add headers or trailers to the text.
  • A few poorly-regarded but still-used protocols use in-band signaling, causing confusion if specific patterns appear in the message. The best-known is the string "From " (including trailing space) at the beginning of a line used to separate mail messages in the mbox file format.

By using a binary-to-text encoding on messages that are already plain text, then decoding on the other end, one can make such systems appear to be completely transparent.

This is sometimes referred to as 'ASCII armoring'. For example, the ViewState component of ASP.NET uses base64 encoding to safely transmit text via HTTP POST,

in order to avoid delimiter collision.

{{See also|Delimiter#ASCII armor|Return-to-libc attack#Protection from return-to-libc attacks}}

Encoding standards

The table below compares the most used forms of binary-to-text encodings. The efficiency listed is the ratio between number of bits in the input and the number of bits in the encoded output.

Encoding Data type Efficiency Programming language implementations Comments
Ascii85 Arbitrary 80% awk, C, [https://github.com/woolstar/test/blob/master/encode/asc85.c C (2)], C#, F#, Go, Java [https://metacpan.org/pod/Convert::Ascii85 Perl], [https://docs.python.org/dev/library/base64.html#base64.a85encode Python], [https://code.google.com/p/python-mom/source/browse/mom/codec/base85.py Python (2)] {{space}}
Base16 (hexadecimal) Arbitrary 50% Most languages {{space}}
Base32 Arbitrary 62.5% ANSI C, Java, [https://docs.python.org/dev/library/base64.html#base64.b32encode Python] {{space}}
Base36 Arbitrary ~64% bash, C, C++, C#, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Visual Basic, Swift, many othersUses the Arabic numerals 0–9 and the Latin letters A–Z (the ISO basic Latin alphabet). Commonly used by URL redirection systems like TinyURL or SnipURL/Snipr as compact alphanumeric identifiers.
Base58 Integer ~73% [https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/base58.h C++], [https://pypi.python.org/pypi/base58 Python] Similar to Base64, but modified to avoid both non-alphanumeric characters and letters which might look ambiguous when printed.
Base64 Arbitrary 75% awk, C, C (2), [https://docs.python.org/dev/library/base64.html#base64.b64encode Python], many others {{space}}
1924}}) Arbitrary 80% [https://github.com/woolstar/test/blob/master/encode/base85.c C], [https://docs.python.org/dev/library/base64.html#base64.b85encode Python] [https://code.google.com/p/python-mom/source/browse/mom/codec/base85.py Python (2)] Revised version of Ascii85.
Base91 Arbitrary ~82% C, Java, PHP, 8086 assembly, AWK {{space}}
Base122 Arbitrary ~86%[https://github.com/kevinAlbs/Base122 JavaScript]
BinHex Arbitrary 75% Perl, C, C (2) MacOS Classic
.boo Arbitrary 75+% [1] C, BASIC, assembly, Pascal[2] Developed by Columbia University for its Kermit protocol[3]
Btoa Arbitrary 80% Early form of Ascii85
Intel HEX Arbitrary ~<50% [https://github.com/vsergeev/libGIS C library], C++ Typically used to program EPROM, NOR-Flash memory chips
MIME Arbitrary See Quoted-printable and Base64 See Quoted-printable and Base64 Encoding container for e-mail-like formatting
S-record (Motorola hex) Arbitrary 49.6% [https://github.com/vsergeev/libGIS C library], C++ Typically used to program EPROM, NOR-Flash memory chips. 49.6% assumes 255 binary bytes per record.
[https://github.com/CryptoHub-place/signal124 Signal124]Arbitrary~82%[https://github.com/CryptoHub-place/signal124/tree/master/php/signal124 PHP], [https://github.com/CryptoHub-place/signal124/tree/master/go/signal124 Go(WIP)]Binary data to GSM 7-bit transfer from CRYPTO ■ HUB™ initiative
Percent encoding Text (URIs), Arbitrary ([https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1738 RFC1738]) ~40%{{efn|For arbitrary data; encoding all 189 non-unreserved characters with three bytes, and the remaining 66 characters with one.}} (33–70%{{efn|For text; only encoding each of the 18 reserved characters.}}) C, [https://docs.python.org/3/library/urllib.parse.html#module-urllib.parse Python], probably many others {{space}}
Quoted-printable Text ~33–100%{{efn|1= One byte stored as =XX. Encoding all but the 94 characters which don't need it (incl. space and tab).}} Probably many Preserves line breaks; cuts lines at 76 characters
Uuencoding Arbitrary ~60% (up to 70%) Perl, C, [https://github.com/frohoff/jdk8u-dev-jdk/blob/master/src/share/classes/sun/misc/UUEncoder.java Java], probably many others Largely replaced by MIME and yEnc
Xxencoding Arbitrary ~75% (similar to Uuencoding) C Proposed (and occasionally used) as replacement for Uuencoding to avoid character set translation problems between ASCII and the EBCDIC systems that could corrupt Uuencoded data
yEnc Arbitrary, mostly non-text ~98% C Includes a CRC checksum
Z85 Arbitrary 80% [https://github.com/zeromq/rfc/blob/master/src/spec_32.c C], [https://github.com/artemkin/z85 C/C++], Python, Ruby, Node.js, Go ZeroMQ base85; safe for inclusion as string in source code
1751}} (S/KEY) Arbitrary 33% C,[4] [https://www.dlitz.net/software/pycrypto/doc/#crypto-util-rfc1751 Python], ...

"A Convention for Human-readable 128-bit Keys". A series of small English words is easier for humans to read, remember, and type in than decimal or other binary-to-text encoding systems.[4]

Each 64-bit number is mapped to six short words, of one to four characters each, from a public 2048-word dictionary.[5]

The 95 isprint codes 32 to 126 are known as the ASCII printable characters.

Some older and today uncommon formats include BOO, BTOA, and USR encoding.

Most of these encodings generate text containing only a subset of all ASCII printable characters: for example, the base64 encoding generates text that only contains upper case and lower case letters, (A–Z, a–z), numerals (0–9), and the "+", "/", and "=" symbols.

Some of these encoding (quoted-printable and percent encoding) are based on a set of allowed characters and a single escape character. The allowed characters are left unchanged, while all other characters are converted into a string starting with the escape character. This kind of conversion allows the resulting text to be almost readable, in that letters and digits are part of the allowed characters, and are therefore left as they are in the encoded text.

These encodings produce the shortest plain ASCII output for input that is mostly printable ASCII.

Some other encodings (base64, uuencoding) are based on mapping all possible sequences of six bits into different printable characters. Since there are more than 26 = 64 printable characters, this is possible. A given sequence of bytes is translated by viewing it as stream of bits, breaking this stream in chunks of six bits and generating the sequence of corresponding characters. The different encodings differ in the mapping between sequences of bits and characters and in how the resulting text is formatted.

Some encodings (the original version of BinHex and the recommended encoding for CipherSaber) use four bits instead of six, mapping all possible sequences of 4 bits onto the 16 standard hexadecimal digits.

Using 4 bits per encoded character leads to a 50% longer output than base64, but simplifies encoding and decoding—expanding each byte in the source independently to two encoded bytes is simpler than base64's expanding 3 source bytes to 4 encoded bytes.

Out of PETSCII's first 192 codes, 164 have visible representations when quoted: 5 (white), 17–20 and 28–31 (colors and cursor controls), 32–90 (ascii equivalent), 91–127 (graphics), 129 (orange), 133–140 (function keys), 144–159 (colors and cursor controls), and 160–192 (graphics).[6] This theoretically permits encodings, such as base128, between PETSCII-speaking machines.

Notes

{{Notelist}}

References

1. ^http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/ftp/boo/ckboo.txt
2. ^{{cite mailing list |url = http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/ftp/e/mail.88a |title = Announcing MS-DOS Kermit 2.30 |publisher = Kermit Project, Columbia University |mailinglist = Info-Kermit Digest |date = 1988-01-11 |accessdate = 3 March 2016 |author1 = Doupnik, Joe |author2 = da Cruz, Frank }}
3. ^{{cite mailing list |url = http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/ftp/e/mail.86a |title = Re: Printable Encodings for Binary Files |publisher = Kermit Project, Columbia University |mailinglist = Info-Kermit Digest |date = 1986-03-20 |accessdate = 1 March 2016 |author = da Cruz, Frank }}
4. ^{{IETF RFC|1751}}"A Convention for Human-Readable 128-bit Keys"
5. ^{{IETF RFC|1760}} "The S/KEY One-Time Password System".
6. ^http://sta.c64.org/cbm64pet.html et al

3 : Binary-to-text encoding formats|Computer file formats|Character encoding

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