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Re: base64


From: Erwan David <Erwan.David () trusted-logic fr>
Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2003 08:44:43 +0200

Le Mon 22/09/2003, "Ilya Teterin"  disait
Consider we decoding data which contains padding character ('=') at the unexpected place. What we should do with such 
data? The specification of base64 decoding does not tell us what we MUST or even MAY do with such data... So, we can 
do anything we like to do:

1. threat padding character as end of the encoded data
2. ignore padding character
3. decode padding character as well as some other character from
   base64 alphabet
4. do something else ;-)

I have tested some popular implementations (such as email clients,
GNU utilities, RTL and other development's libraries). All items
(1)-(4) are actually pre

I'll add 5. consider data encoding as broken and return an error. The
base64 specification specifies how to encode. If you get padding character
inside data, it's no more base64 encoded data.

-- 
Erwan David
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