Talk:ASCII armor

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)

The ASCII armor term is familiar to PGP/GPG users, particularly those working in Unix-like operating systems. If this article is removed or relocated, please ensure that searches for ASCII armor will still lead to the info contained herein. Might also be useful to include a reference to RFC-2440, where the PGP ASCII Armor encoding scheme is detailed. Thanks! --Swaddell 13:53, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

The RFC, and in particular the first occurence of ASCII Armor, says:

OpenPGP provides the service of converting the raw 8-bit binary octet stream to a stream of printable ASCII characters, called Radix-64 encoding or ASCII Armor.

In other words, ASCII Armor is another name of a specific binary-to-text encoding (the Radix-64). As for how a binary-to-text encodings should be called, I'll try to do some research. Paolo Liberatore (Talk) 14:15, 30 November 2005 (UTC)


 * 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)

The new page is not mine, you know... Nor is any other page of someone else (thanks for the correction, anyway).

I view this point exactly in the opposite way as you do: I never heard of ASCII armor before, as func above. Some research showed that its main use was in PGP. Before starting writing that page, I made some research to tell whether ASCII armor is actually so much used as an alternative to a scheme for encoding 8bit data in a stream of 7bit characters. At least according to Google, the use of ASCII armor outside of PGP and outside of wikipedia is not so much widespread: Google on "ASCII armor" -pgp -wikipedia gives 509 hits (note that the first hit is on a page that refer to the wikipedia article on ASCII armor)


 * 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)

Whether "binary to text encoding" is appropriate is another story. "binary to ASCII encoding" is also sometimes used. Paolo Liberatore (Talk) 16:34, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

Moved/redirected
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)

"Armor" includes a wrapper
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 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)