bug#38587: base64-decode-region breaks encoding

[Andreas Schwab]

On Dez 15 2019, Juri Linkov wrote:

> Maybe an additional CODING arg for base64-decode-region?

BASE64 is defined on a sequence of bytes.  It doesn't make sense to
apply it to characters.

The input of base64-encode-region needs to be encoded into bytes and the
output of base64-decode-region needs to be decoded into characters.  If
you do that, you get a full reversible operation.

> Or it would be enough to use the coding system of the
> output buffer?

The coding system of the output buffer has nothing to do with the coding
of the data produced by base64-decode-region, just like
process-coding-system is independent from the coding system of the
process buffer.

Andreas.

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Andreas Schwab, schwab@linux-m68k.org
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