Marc Horowitz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > "Richard M. Stallman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >>> Is there some situation in which the current behavior of >>> base64-decode-region causes an actual problem or confusion for users? > > I never would have noticed this had it not caused me a problem. > > I received a piece of email which passed through an older MTA. This > MTA inserted a ! and a newline after every 1000 characters of a very > long line of base64-encoded data, which used to be common behavior. > When Gnus tried to display this email, it failed, because the ! > characters were not recognized as valid base64 encoding.
MIME puts a limit on the line length at 76 characters. So in most cases this will in it self be a broken behavior. (Base64 can probably be used outside MIME too, of course). >>> Is there some situation in which the current behavior provides an >>> advantage? > > The only case I can think of is if a program or the user tries to > base64 decode something which is not base64 encoded, they will receive > an error, instead of some other, possibly confusing behavior. > However, I believe this case is less common than non-transparent MTAs > making small changes to base64-encded data. I actually wrote some code for No Gnus recently that depended on base64-decode-string to throw an error on strings that where not base64 encoded. Then it turned out that XEmacs' implementation of base64-decode-region/base64-decode-string _does_ ignore illegal characters in the base64 encoding. The problem is that we have no other way to detect if a region/string is base64 encoded or not. I thought about doing a decode and then encode and compare the before and after string, but I finally found another to recognize the data (it was a PEM encoded X509 certificate and should therefore begin with "MII"). >>> Also, how does the current development Emacs handle these things? >>> Your report is based on 21.4; the current sources may be different. > > I do not know. I think the behavior is unchanged. Kind regards, -- Arne Jørgensen <http://arnested.dk/> _______________________________________________ Emacs-devel mailing list Emacs-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-devel
