Quote:
Originally Posted by photics
So, the Base64 code breaks down into Binary?!
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Base64 encoding is a numbering scheme for a base 64 system (i.e. you count to 64 in your 1's place before creating a 64's place and starting over... so the number 64 would be represented as '10' in a base 64 system). This is what wikipedia says about it:
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Base 64 or quadrosexagesimal is a positional notation using a base of 64. It is the largest power-of-two base that can be represented using only printable ASCII characters. This has led to its use as a transfer encoding for e-mail among other things. All well-known variants that are known by the name Base64 use the characters A?Z, a?z, and 0?9 in that order for the first 62 digits but the symbols chosen for the last two digits vary considerably between different systems.
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For further details, you can see the full article
here.
Quote:
Originally Posted by photics
Is that the native version, or is it a hybrid of binary and hexidecimal?
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Binary, Hexadecimal, and base 64 are different numbering systems, but they are closely related because they are all based on powers of two:
Binary = 2^1
Hexadecimal = base 16 = 2^4
Base 64 = 2^6
One side effect of this is that a single hexadecimal character will map to 4 bits and one single base 64 character will map to 6 bits. For example, F in hexadecimal is 1111 in binary. Similarly, the highest digit in base 64 (which varies between base 64 variants) is 111111 in binary.
For this reason, Hexadecimal and Base 64 are frequently used to represent binary data. And that's probably more than you ever wanted to know about this stuff
