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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CODEC-58?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#action_12543063
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Joerg Schaible commented on CODEC-58:
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The RFC 4648 talks about "The encoding process represents 24-bit groups of
input bits as output strings of 4 encoded characters". This implies that each
of this "characters" represent 8 bit. Obviously this does not match Java's
representation of a "char". Therefore the method returns bytes.
The documentation mentions the character set is the one used in MIME encoding
(RFC 2045, p25), other character sets are not supported. Nevertheless the
character set consists of characters that can be representated within 8 bits.
So the documentation could state that the result of a Base64 encoding is a byte
stream that represents a String with ASCII encoding.
> Character set used by Base64 not documented
> -------------------------------------------
>
> Key: CODEC-58
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CODEC-58
> Project: Commons Codec
> Issue Type: Bug
> Affects Versions: 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4
> Reporter: Pepijn Schmitz
> Priority: Minor
>
> The Javadoc for the Base64 class does not document which character set is
> returned by encode() and expected by decode(). The RFC specifies
> "characters", not "bytes" as the result of the encoding, and yet Base64
> returns bytes. It should provide complete information as to how to convert
> these bytes to and from Strings. I assume the character set used is ASCII,
> but that should be made explicit in the Javadoc.
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