[boost] Re: [serialize] xml archives and base 64 encoded binary data

From: Russell Hind (rh_gmane_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-10-20 09:34:45

Ok, looking at the spec from http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1521.html 
section 5.2, = is only needed when the data doesn't end on a 
four-character boundary, and is used to pad it to a four-character boundary.

Does the encoding in serialize do this? (the data stream we had was 
long, so not sure exactly how many characters were in it as the XML file 
is hard to calculate this due to line breaks etc).

When adding a single '=' to our data sent, the pythong decoding routine 
decoded it correctly which implies one character padding was necessary 
for our data and it doesn't look to have been added by serialize.

Thanks

Russell

Russell Hind wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm writing some binary data to an xml_oarchive (a vector of floats).
> 
> I'm then giving the xml files to some python uses we have here so they 
> can read them in.  They had trouble with the base64 encoding of the 
> binary data.
> 
> One has mentioned that base64 spec says an '=' must be appended to the 
> data to indicate the padding up to the next 4-byte multiple.
> 
> When they added an '=' to the data between the tags in the resultant xml 
> file, they could decode it successfully.
> 
> If it is in the spec (am trying to find a link to check this), can the 
> the base64 encoding in serialize be modified to do this before the 
> 1.32.0 release, so it conforms to the standard?
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Russell
> 
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