Merlin Moncure wrote:
> On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 4:14 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>
>> Heikki Linnakangas <heikki.linnakangas@enterprisedb.com> writes:
>>
>>> Tom Lane wrote:
>>>
>>>> I'm thinking plain old pairs-of-hex-digits might be the best
>>>> tradeoff if conversion speed is the criterion.
>>>>
>>> That's a lot less space-efficient than base64, though.
>>>
>> Well, base64 could give a 33% savings, but it's significantly harder
>> to encode/decode. Also, since it has a much larger set of valid
>> data characters, it would be *much* more likely to allow old-style
>> formatting to be mistaken for new-style. Unless we can think of
>> a more bulletproof format selection mechanism, that could be
>> an overriding consideration.
>>
>
> another nit with base64 is that properly encoded data requires
> newlines according to the standard.
>
er, no, not as I read rfc 3548 s 2.1.
cheers
andrew