Re: base64 behavior is not MIME compliant

[Nic Ferrier <nferrier@tapsellferrier.co.uk>]

Marc Horowitz <marc@mit.edu> writes:

> Nic Ferrier <nferrier@tapsellferrier.co.uk> writes:
>
>>> Why can't you just pre-parse the data parsed to the base64 decoder? I
>>> believe that's the correct behaviour. A base64 decoder should decode
>>> base64, not "base64 but also it does this extra trick if you wave your
>>> hand in the air"
>
> You could do that, but then the pre-parser needs to know what base64
> character sets looks like, so it's not a very clean abstraction.  

I disagree. Base64 is a well documented and understood
encoding. Particularly the acceptable characters.

A function base64-clean or clean-for-base64 would be better than
changing the base64 decoder to accept unstandard characters.



> decoder already knows everything it needs to know.  It's also likely
> that other apps which want to do base64 decoding will want this same
> functionality, so repeating it makes little sense.
>
> But in the end, I don't care strongly if the code is in emacs or in
> gnus, as long as it's somewhere.

Can you go over again where you had the problem? Was it a particular
message from some particular MTA? Or was it something more general?


Nic