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Grex Info Item 178: help decoding binary coded ascii
Entered by carl on Sat Sep 17 14:15:13 UTC 1994:

I received a file in the mail which has encoded binary.  The only
problem is that I can't figure out how to unencode it.  I already
tried uudecode.

FYI, the first lines are:

 
^GBINARY FILE FOLLOWS
xbtoa Begin
s&W#adi&2d!=Af-zqu6g"1&qjd!!!6('EA+563$uc%ffW1!!$%"!!!E-=o\O&X8i5#s8NE+!!!3(!!
#](FED)7+@g?lBPCs!0f!6XB`P^Es8RoU56,3oA,p-?$ig;.!!!"J:;R$B!<*]k&6K/;!!!!15`PhW


Does anyone have any clues?

18 responses total.

#1 of 18 by robh on Sat Sep 17 19:14:00 1994:

That's a "btoa" (binary to ASCII) file, it's like uuencode, but
a different program.  You need to use the program "atob"
to convert it back to binary.  (Three bonus point for figuring
out what "atob" means.)

Unfortunately, Grex doesn't seem to have these programs any more.
Anyone know where carl (or anyone else) can get a usable atob
program?

#2 of 18 by kentn on Sat Sep 17 20:34:51 1994:

I've got it somewhere on another system.  I'll look and see if I
either have the source, or if it's a shell script that can easily
be brought over.

#3 of 18 by tsty on Sun Sep 18 07:59:24 1994:

Hmmm, for those bonus points, ummm, dos2unix - - no, how about
unix2dos - errp, that dosen't work .......OH! ascii-to-binary! Yeh!
  
Third time's a charm, right?
  
This file came from overseas, are btoa and atob precursors of uu[en/de]code?

#4 of 18 by kentn on Sun Sep 18 20:00:02 1994:

The source code to atob/btoa is available from oak.oakland.edu in the
/pub/unix-c/mail directory.  The file is "btoa.tar.Z" and it's about 20K.
Given that it's not something that is universally accepted on the Net,
like uuencode, I have a hunch the staff here won't see much reason to
install it on Grex.  It should compile rather easily (at least, the
makefile has no surprises) if you want to make it for your own use.
I can e-mail you a uuencoded copy of btoa.tar.Z, or put it in /tmp if
you can't ftp it yourself.

#5 of 18 by popcorn on Mon Sep 19 04:10:22 1994:

This response has been erased.

#6 of 18 by kentn on Mon Sep 19 04:57:23 1994:

Funny isn't it, how there isn't a problem installing a program few
people will use, but a popular program generates all kinds of objections
from staff and may never get installed...
  Anyway, if staff want to install btoa, it's in my home dir.

#7 of 18 by srw on Mon Sep 19 06:27:22 1994:

I have a short memory, Kent. What program is that?
(And whichever one it is, I'll bet the objections aren't based on its
popularity.)

#8 of 18 by kentn on Mon Sep 19 15:38:21 1994:

It would be nice to have uqwk installed.  The main objection at this
point is that it *can* (but does not necessarily have to) generate
packets which are non-RFC-compliant.  Of course a similar argument
could be used against btoa, albeit not in RFC terms (do we want people
using a binary encoder that compresses; will it work when people try to
use uudecode on a btoa file?  Is btoa well enough accepted to be a
standard for information exchange?).
  My remark was mostly tongue-in-cheek musing, btw.  Go ahead and
install btoa if you want.

#9 of 18 by carl on Sat Oct 29 01:56:41 1994:

Rob and Kent, thanks for your help.  Kent, is there some way
I could get a copy of it?  I tried to cd to your directory
and got a "permission denied".

#10 of 18 by kentn on Sat Oct 29 19:40:47 1994:

I'll put a copy in my home dir and I'll see what I can do about
the perms.  (I'll e-mail you about it).

#11 of 18 by c3po on Sun Aug 27 04:33:31 1995:

Has atob been installed on Grex? I can't seem to find it.

#12 of 18 by robh on Sun Aug 27 13:27:43 1995:

We had it aeons ago (i.e. 1992) but I don't think it's here now.
I'll see if I can find the source code somewhere.

#13 of 18 by popcorn on Thu Aug 31 04:03:21 1995:

This response has been erased.

#14 of 18 by robh on Thu Aug 31 09:51:25 1995:

That was me.  Since it was in my /tmp directory, I assume
it's toast now.  Let me know if it's still needed.

#15 of 18 by remmers on Fri Sep 1 10:37:45 1995:

(I sent you mail about that, when it was warm bread but before
it was toast...)

#16 of 18 by c3po on Sat Sep 2 11:38:05 1995:

I don't need it anymore. I asked the person sending the file to uuencode
instead and resend. Worked fine. Thanks muchly all.

#17 of 18 by remmers on Sat Sep 2 12:12:23 1995:

  Well tough. We're going to install it anyway.  :)

#18 of 18 by popcorn on Sun Sep 3 12:55:46 1995:

This response has been erased.

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