Binary-to-text encoding: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 11:42, 28 September 2007

Revision as of 15:15, 28 September 2007

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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. Also, hexadecimal is the only binary-to-text coding that can easily be understood by human readers, without calculation.

[[Category:Binary-to-text encoding formats|*]]