Comment by dwattttt
10 hours ago
> Still, at least it's an option to put base64 inline inside the JSON. With binary, this is not an option and must send it separately in all cases, even small binary...
There's nothing special about "text" or binary here. You can absolutely put binary inside other binary; you use a symbol that doesn't appear inside the binary, much like you do for text.
You use a divider, like " is for json, and a prearranged way to avoid that symbol from appearing inside the inner binary (the same approach that works for text works here).
What do you think a zip file is? They're not storing compressed binary data as text, I can tell you that.
Binary usually means arbitrary byte sequences so you can't choose a single delimiting character. The usual approaches are storing the length somewhere or picking a sufficiently long random sequence that it's vanishingly unlikely to occur in the payload.
This reminds me that I just learned the other day that .a files are unix archives, which have a textual representation (and if all the bundled files are textual, there's no binary information in the bundle). I thought .a was just for static libraries for the longest time, and had no idea that it was actually an old archive format.
It may amuse you to learn that tar headers are designed as straight up text tables with fixed-width columns, marred only by the fact that modern implementations pad with 0s instead of spaces. The numbers are encoded as octal digits!