Re: lynx-dev to uuencode or not to uuencode

[pg]

In a recent note, David Combs said:

> Date: Mon, 3 May 1999 04:25:34 -0700
> 
> On Sun, May 02, 1999 at 09:38:54AM -0500, kweide wrote:
> > 
> > Uuencoding is broken by design, in my opinion.  It uses unsafe
> > characters.  There are multiple incompatible encoders and decoders.
> > A given uudecode may be picky about whether spaces are preserved
> 
> Please give us some examples of systems that come with
> uudecodes that are incompatible with other systems'
> uuencodes.
> 
IBM Mainframes.

o Trailing whitespace will probably be stripped.  SunOS uudecode
  (at least) then pads the line to its declared length with nulls
  rather than spaces, corrupting the data.  The common remedy of
  using '`' instead of ' ' is not permitted by POSIX.

o The codes for brackets are not well defined.  A given uuencode/
  uudecode may assume different code points from the network
  interface, corrupting the data.

-- gil