[Python-Dev] Base-85 (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Sat Aug 2 21:58:50 CEST 2008

Martin v. Löwis <martin v.loewis.de> writes:

P.S. Just in case it isn't clear: I would oppose any specific proposal to add this Ascii85 algorithm to the standard library. It would sound like we don't have any real problems to solve.

According to Wikipedia, "its main modern use is in Adobe's PostScript and Portable Document Format file formats".

It is also used by git for diffs of binary files, and those diffs are supposedly understood by other VCSes like Mercurial... indeed, Mercurial has a Python extension for base85 encoding (but licensed under the GPL): http://selenic.com/hg/index.cgi/file/cbdfd08eabc9/mercurial/base85.c (I suppose Bazaar has something similar)

Endly, since this encoding allows to pack more bytes into the same number of ASCII characters than its traditional alternatives, it is likely to gain traction in applications which need to create a pure ASCII representation of binary data.

Regards

Antoine.

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