From: gregarican <greg.kujawa@...>
Date: 2006-10-21T12:20:11+09:00
Subject: Re: rexml difficulties

This is something that I personally use for a Ruby routine I have that
stores stock item images for the retail jewelry company I work for. I
extract JPG images and store them as Base-64 encoded elements in an XML
file. Then I port that into a SQL database. To extract the images I
just decode them. Works like a charm and perhaps saves some SQL
resources since I'm not storing the images and actual BLOB items...

James Britt wrote:
> Harold Hausman wrote:
>
> > It sounds like you might have some experience in this area. Not to
> > hijack the OP, but could you possibly describe the process you would
> > go through if you had a completely random pile of binary barf that you
> > wanted to store as an XML attribute?
> >
> > Would your process include using Base64?
>
> http://www.topxml.com/xml/articles/binary/
>
> "Base64 encoding, specified in RFC 2045 - MIME (Multipurpose Internet
> Mail Extensions) uses a 64-character subset (A-Za-z0-9+/) to represent
> binary data and = for padding. Base64 processes data as 24-bit groups,
> mapping this data to four encoded characters. It is sometimes referred
> to as 3-to-4 encoding. Each 6 bits of the 24-bit group is used as an
> index into a mapping table (the base64 alphabet) to obtain a character
> for the encoded data. According to the MIME specification the encoded
> data has line lengths limited to 76 characters, but this line length
> restriction does not apply when transmitting binary data as part of XML
> document."
>
>
>
> It's a common, practical approach.
>
>
> --
> James Britt
> 
> "Every object obscures another object."
>     - Luis Bunuel