I'm trying to use the command base64 somefile.ext
to covert files to text. The only problem is that the file size increases by 35%, and that becomes unacceptable for my larger files. I suspect that the files could be encoded in a way that makes their size smaller. Currently the encoding of the outputted file is us-ascii
.
Is there an encoding that would make for a smaller file size?
base64
is usually used to represent binary files in an ASCII string format so it will always use extra space.null
andCR
, but to my observationsbase64
doesn't return any of those characters.