11 lines
699 B
Text
11 lines
699 B
Text
The MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) specification (RFC 1341
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and successors) defines a mechanism for encoding arbitrary binary information
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for transmission by electronic mail. Triplets of 8-bit octets are encoded as
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groups of four characters, each representing 6 bits of the source 24 bits.
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Only characters present in all variants of ASCII and EBCDIC are used, avoiding
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incompatibilities in other forms of encoding such as uuencode/uudecode.
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base64 is a command line utility which encodes and decodes files in this
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format. It can be used within a pipeline as an encoding or decoding filter,
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and is most commonly used in this manner as part of an automated mail
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processing system.
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