Re: Base64 Encoding

Mihael,

Base64 has no concept of character sets, so I find your description confusing.

Anything you encode with base64 will decode to the exact same binary value.  So if you encode EBCDIC data, it will decode to the exact same data.  Where many people get this wrong is that they encode ASCII or Unicode data, then decode it and are surprised when its unreadable as EBCDIC data. (or vice-versa).  This shouldn't surprise people, though, since it will have the same binary value.   The binary values of ASCII or UNICODE will look like "garbage" if viewed as EBCDIC.

But, Greg seems to understand this already as his example is converting the data to utf-8 prior to encoding.  So ...  why are you saying this stuff?



On 5/16/19 9:38 PM, Mihael Schmidt wrote:

Base64 encoding is character set dependent. If you encode your data with an encoder for some EBCDIC CCSID and your online encoder expects it to be UTF8 it won't work.

The ILEastic project has a Base64 encoder for UTF8. This will definitely work better with the online encoders. I have successfully used it for JWT signing where you also have to Base64 encode the parts of the JWT token.

Best regards

Mihael


On 16.05.19 23:36, Greg Wilburn wrote:

Is this the easiest way to Base64 encode and XML document (either in an RPG variable or on the IFS) for use in a SOAP web service?

I've used Scott's BASE64R4 service program for smaller things like API keys, etc.

I've been trying to mock-up a test scenario, and I'm not getting the results I expected - pretty sure I'm doing something wrong with the varchar fields.  The code I'm copying was using much smaller fixed length fields.

xmlData and xmlData64 are both varchar(2048)... however the data is nowhere near that large (utflen=710).

    http_setCCSIDs( 1208: 0 );
    utflen = HTTP_xlatedyn( %len(%trim(xmlData))
                          : %addr(xmlData)
                          : TO_ASCII
                          : p_xmlDataUTF );

    b64len = base64_encode( p_xmlDataUTF
                          : utflen
                          : %addr(xmlData64)
                          : %size(xmlData64) );

    dealloc p_xmlDataUTF;


My resulting data in xmlData64 does not match the online encoders.

Thanks,
Greg