Re: uudecode on II

[dempson@actrix.gen.nz (David Empson)]

In article <pW81YkV.wdphoenix@delphi.com>,
Leslie M. Barstow III  <wdphoenix@delphi.com> wrote:
>  
> The source to sscii is (I think) out there somewhere.

Nope.  sscii is an ORCA/Shell program by Derek Taubert.  You might be
thinking of sciibin (BinSCII decoder) or bsc (BinSCII encoder).

Both of these are available in source form (though I haven't seen bsc
anywhere) and should compile on most UNIX systems (also MS-DOS and
other text-based environment).  Brian Tao has also written a program
called BINPOST which simplifies posting BinSCII files to
comp.binaries.apple2.  I'm not sure what it does, exactly.  Brian?

> This program creates "binscii" format files which are more efficient
> than uuencode (6&2 encoding vs 5&3 for uuencode),

Wrong.  UUENCODE is also 6&2.  It is somewhat less efficient than
BinSCII because every line in a UUENCODE file has a length character
at the beginning (usually M for 64 byte lines), so a moderately long
UUENCODEd file will be a little longer than the corresponding
BinSCIIed file.  BinSCII has a three line header which is longer than
the UUENCODE header, but for full sized BinSCII segments, the total
size is less than the extra characters added by UUENCODE's length bytes.

> and also preserve file information.

Very true.  This is the main reason for using BinSCII instead of
UUENCODE.  The other benefit of BinSCII is that files are split up
into 16k chunks (after encoding, 12k before), and can be posted in
parts without having to worry about getting them in the right order at
the receiving end, and without having to do a lot of messy editing.
-- 
David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz
Snail mail: P.O. Box 27-103, Wellington, New Zealand