Subject: "xbtoa Begin" string?...

From: [email-masked] (Nickolay V Golego)
Date: 19 Apr 1995 14:11:19 GMT

Hi there,

I received the message in Pmail which looks like:

xbtoa Begin
[...]
xbtoa End [...]

Could anyone give me a hint how to decode and read it? Usual uudecode 
didn't work on it.

Thanks,

--
                                             Nick
                                 <[email-masked]>

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From: [email-masked] (Ernst Kloecker)
Date: Sun, 23 Apr 1995 17:06:13 GMT

>Could anyone give me a hint how to decode and read it? Usual uudecode 

You need atob and btoa, a pair of tools like uudecode/uuencode, only with
a better compression rate.

Should be available on the major FTP archives.

-- 
--------------------------------------------
Ernst Kloecker          [email-masked]
--------------------------------------------

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From: [email-masked] (B Khaitan)
Date: 27 Apr 1995 21:51:07 GMT

In <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Ernst Kloecker)

>Should be available on the major FTP archives.
The only atob decoder I know of is atob v1.1 and the zipped file can
commonly be found by the name 'atob11.zip'.  I have a question about
how to "unchunk" btoa encoded files because they are usually sent in
64k packets.

________
Rishi Khaitan:  [email-masked]

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From: [email-masked] (Robert A. Rosenberg)
Date: Sat, 29 Apr 95 03:26:34 GMT

In Article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked]
>Could anyone give me a hint how to decode and read it? Usual uudecode 

You've already had the format identified for you so I'll get direct to how
to possibly convert it.

Since I assume you are either a Shell-Only user and/or use a PC as opposed
to a Macintosh as your computer, thus the following will be of limited use
to you (although it could be useful to Macintosh owning lurkers who need to
handle AtoB/BtoA. StuffIt Deluxe (one of the Major Macintosh Archiving
Programs [it is the one that generates SIT files]) comes with a number of
Translators - One of these is AtoB/BtoA. Thus this program is your solution
to converting the file via a Macintosh Program. There should be (I think)
MS-DOS and UNIX AtoB (ASCII to Binary) Utilities in the respective Internet
Archive Sites but I am not going to state this with 100% certainty. A quick
Archie [?] with the keyword of AtoB  (and/or BtoA) should locate them.

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From: [email-masked] (DONALD G. DAVIS)
Date: 29 Apr 1995 17:12:06 -0600

>how to "unchunk" btoa encoded files because they are usually sent in

	I have found a BTOA.ZIP and an ATOB.ZIP on ftp sites.  The former 
contains C versions of both BTOA.COM and ATOB.COM.   The latter contains 
a much smaller assembly-language ATOB.EXE without a corresponding btoa.  
I tried btoa, mime and uuencode on a 520 kb .ZIP file with the following 
size ASCII-encoded files resulting:

btoa		666 kb
mime		713 kb
uuencode	728 kb

	It's clear that the btoa method gives the most compact results.  
Why is btoa not more widely used?
							--Donald Davis

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From: [email-masked] (Moritz Both)
Date: Sun, 30 Apr 1995 02:23:00 +0100

> Why is btoa not more widely used?

I believe in the first row, that's because btoa uses a set of 85  
characters which is known not to be safe in any case to pass through every  
existing mail transfer mechanism. Some of the characters may become  
changed or lines could get corrupted.

Mime, that is, base64, uses a set of characters which is known to be safe  
in nearly every case. From RFC 1521:

-------------------- 8< --- cut here ---------------------------
      NOTE: This subset has the important property that it is
      represented identically in all versions of ISO 646, including US
      ASCII, and all characters in the subset are also represented
      identically in all versions of EBCDIC.  Other popular encodings,
      such as the encoding used by the uuencode utility and the base85
      encoding specified as part of Level 2 PostScript, do not share
      these properties, and thus do not fulfill the portability
      requirements a binary transport encoding for mail must meet.
-------------------- 8< --- and here ---------------------------

Moritz