Talk:ASCII armor

message: With regard to this being listed on Pages needing attention, we could do a clean up here, but we'd just end up repeating a lot of content already available at Binary and text files. I've never heard the term ASCII armor, but it is clearly just jargon for 8-bit to 7-bit safe encoding, rather than somehow being its own unique concept. I think this page should be redirected to Binary and text files, with a new section there about the use of this term, (or we might create a new article with a less fanciful name to discuss the purposes of Base64, uuencode, etc.). I'll wait awile and see if anyone wishes to propose something else. func(talk) 05:49, 14 Sep 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: the term is also used more generally though to describe binary to text encodings in general in fact i don't think i've ever heard anyone use the term binary to text encoding before someone here changed a link to point to his new page with that title. Plugwash 16:04, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

text: I don't agree: without "binary to text encoding" you wouldn't be able to attach any binary file to your emails. see MIME -- Thunderbolt (talk) 16:06, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

message: I have taken the action of turning this page into a redirect onto the "main" article. I have also merged all the useful content from this page into that one, greatly improving it (IMHO). Notices of the use of the term "ASCII Armor" will be made both in the main article, and in the radix64 one. Maury 20:55, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Moved/redirected 

message: I view "ASCII armor" as the packaging around (and including) the binary-to-text encoding. For example, RFC 4880 § 6.2 (RFC 4880 obsoleted RFC 2440) says:
6.2.  Forming ASCII Armor
When OpenPGP encodes data into ASCII Armor, it puts specific headers
around the Radix-64 encoded data, so OpenPGP can reconstruct the data
later.  An OpenPGP implementation MAY use ASCII armor to protect raw
binary data.  OpenPGP informs the user what kind of data is encoded
in the ASCII armor through the use of the headers.
This gives meaning to the word armor and differentiates "ASCII Armor" from "ASCII Encoding" or other binary-to-text encodings. I have taken to calling the RFC 2047 encoding as "ASCII Armor" for this reason.
Example OpenPGP ASCII Armor (from RFC 4880 § 6.6):
-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
Version: OpenPrivacy 0.99
yDgBO22WxBHv7O8X7O/jygAEzol56iUKiXmV+XmpCtmpqQUKiQrFqclFqUDBovzS
vBSFjNSiVHsuAA==
=njUN
-----END PGP MESSAGE-----
This ASCII Armor is a block containing an opening, a header with version information, the radix-64-encoded data, and a closing.
Example MIME ASCII Armor header encoding (from RFC 2047 § 2):
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?q?this=20is=20some=20text?=
This ASCII Armor is inline (inside a Subject header), containing an opening, a character set (ISO-8859-1 in this case), an encoding method (Quoted-printable in this case), the encoded data, and a closing.
I therefore believe that ASCII Armor should have its own page that links to Binary-to-text encoding (its current redirection target). Delimiter#ASCII_armor also needs a rewrite, as (at least to me) the second paragraph and the example make no sense and have nothing to do with ASCII Armor, instead describing cases in which character escaping is used. -- Adam KatzΔ☎ 21:34, 23 June 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Armor" includes a wrapper