launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Benji York <benji.york@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 8:55 AM, Aaron Bentley <aaron@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> On 11-06-02 10:33 PM, Robert Collins wrote:
>> Must:
>> * handle binary data (librarian, gpg signing requests,
>
> AIUI, JSON does not natively support binary data.  It defines only a
> unicode string datatype.
>
> http://json.org/
>
> There are all kinds of potential workarounds, from base64 encoding to
> arrays of numbers, but you then need to specify that the item is bytes,
> not whatever it appears to be.

One option if using HTTP as the transport (which seems to be the
direction we're headed) is that multipart/mixed POSTs can contain both
JSON (or other human-friendly, text-based format) and high-density
(i.e., not bulky BASE64 encoded) binary data.
-- 
Benji York