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Retrocomputing

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  • 7
    uuencode IIRC had leading/trailing whitespace as being meaningful, which could cause issues AFAIK. Commented Jun 1, 2017 at 14:59
  • 7
    uuencode was a de-facto standard that never made it into any RFC. Base64 was a real standard that made it into the earliest MIME RFCs and ended up in a dedicated (RFC3548, RFC3648) one. Commented Jun 1, 2017 at 17:35
  • 7
    @tofro somehow I think if the MIME designers had wanted UUencode, they’d have added it to the RFC ;-). Commented Jun 1, 2017 at 18:32
  • 16
    Actually, reflowed uuencode, although theoretically recoverable, was not handled well by the tools. Conversely, the standard Base64 decoding algorithm doesn't care about spaces or line breaks at all. Commented Jun 1, 2017 at 23:22
  • 8
    Base64 is not sensitive to whitespace formatting at all as whitespace is specified to have a very specific meaning in base64: it means ignore this byte and read the next byte. Commented Jun 3, 2017 at 21:13