From: Sam Roberts <sroberts@...>
Date: 2003-05-31T19:59:10+09:00
Subject: What is BER compression? (was RCR: unpack/pack Bignum)

Is it documented anywhere, what this 'w' template is useful for?

It appears to be an implementation of the encoding used for individual
integers in an OBJECT IDENTIFIER, from  this (Japanese) post:

  http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-list/22463
 
This seems like an enormously BER specific type of encoding to be taking
up a letter in pack! It's not even used anywhere else in BER, just OIDs.
You can't use it for INTEGERs, for example.

Just curious, since I've written a BER/SMIME toolkit over the last year.

Thanks,
Sam

Quoteing nobu.nokada@softhome.net, on Thu, May 29, 2003 at 07:02:06PM +0900:
> > What is 'w' used for? I had missed that one.
> 
> BER (Basic Encoding Rules) compression.
>