There seems to be confusion about what Base64 (jeez, I keep typing "54" or "65"!) encoding is. It's just what it sounds like: an encoding of characters using a 64-character* alphabet, i.e., six bits at a time. Hex '01020304' Base64-encodes to the same set of 8-bit characters whether ASCII or EBCDIC. "abcd" encodes to different characters depending on whether the input is EBCDIC or ASCII because the bytes (and thus the chunks of six bits0 are different.
That means that if you Base64-encode an ASCII string, you can decode it on an EBCDIC platform (after translating the characters from ASCII to EBCDIC) and you get the original string-in ASCII. If you want translation, you need to translate before encoding or after decoding. So "Is there a bilingual [ASCII/EBCDIC] version of Base64" really doesn't make sense. *Although there are some slight variations. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64#Variants_summary_table if you're really bored. For the character geeks out there, there's a Unicode Base32K that's normalization safe. That'll really make your head hurt. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
