per@philabs.Philips.Com (Paul Rutter) (05/30/87)
>One thing to note about atob/btoa is that will append upto 3 (or 4?) null >bytes upon conversion from printable chars to binary. Compress evidently >can handle it, but I was surprized when I was using them without compress. As the original author of btoa/atob, I can say that this is NOT true. If you encode 3 binary bytes with btoa and decode with atob, you get the same 3 bytes out, no more. (If you run something weird before btoa, then maybe that is introducing word padding.) (Anyway, if tarmail has survived MVS and VMS routing, what more could you ask? -:} ). (There is a byte count in the btoa encoding, and this is used to copy out the right number of bytes from the tmp file used internally). Since there may by now be bogus forms of btoa/atob around, I have reposted the source to net.sources (this is identical, hopefully, to what the compress people distribute, so if you have tarmail stuff from a compress distribution do not worry). Paul Rutter