Re: Why BinSCII?

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

In article <2qvvb0$db7@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu>,
Anthony J. Stuckey <stuckey@mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu> wrote:
> danb@pro-newton.cts.com (Dan Brown) writes:
> >        Yes--BinSCII's _lots_ smarter than uuencode/decode.  For
> >instance, it e automatically recognizes (and ignores) anything
> >that's not part of the BinSCII file, and it puts the pieces in the
> >correct order automatically.  
> >Also, as you mentioned, the files seem to be smaller.
> 
> 	UUencode has an overhead of 35%.  3 bytes -> 4 characters, plus 1
> length character as the first on every line.  Binscii does do a more compact
> encoding.

No it doesn't.  BinSCII also has 3 byte to 4 character encoding (just
in a different order).  You might be thinking of BinSCII 2, which will
support a 25% overhead encoding method (4 bytes to 5 characters).

Comparing BinSCII to UUENCODE: BinSCII doesn't have an extra byte on
each line, but does have a header on each segment (134 bytes).

There are a maximum of 256 lines in a BinSCII segment (assuming
standard encoding software is used), so a BinSCII segment will
be about 120 bytes shorter than the corresponding UUENCODE fragment.
-- 
David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz
Snail mail: P.O. Box 27-103, Wellington, New Zealand