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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.
Some other encodings (base64, uuencoding) are based on mapping all possible sequences of six [[bit]]s into different printable characters. Since there are more than <math>2^6=64</math> 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) use four bits instead of six. This leads to a 50% longer output but simplifies the procedure of encoding, as the byte boundaries in the source data and the character boundaries in the output only line up every second output character instead of every
[[Category:Binary to text encoding formats|*]]
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