After encoding data size is increasing

[Siddesh Basapura]

Hi,

I am having a text data in XML format and it's length is around 816814 bytes. It contains some image data as well as some text data.
We are using ZLIB algorithm for compressing and after compressing, the compressed data length is 487239 bytes.

After compressing we are encoding data using BASE64Encoder. But after encoding the compressed data, size is increasing and length of encoded data is 666748 bytes.

Why after encoding, data size is increasing? Is there any other best encoding techniques?

Regards,
Siddesh

[Henry Wong]

Siddesh Bm wrote:
After compressing we are encoding data using BASE64Encoder. But after encoding the compressed data, size is increasing and length of encoded data is 666748 bytes.

Why after encoding, data size is increasing? Is there any other best encoding techniques?

That's how base64 encoding works... it takes bytes which has 256 possible values and limits them to only 64 possible values (plus one or two for control purposes). These values are limited to the ASCII printable range, and hence, can pass through systems that will choke on binary data.

So what happens when 8 bits of a byte must fit into bytes that effectively only has 5 bits ? Obviously, you need more bytes.

Henry

[fred rosenberger]

encoding is NOT the same thing as compression, as you probably know.

Base64 is often used on binary data that needs to be transmitted across a system that isn't really designed for binary. Depending on what you're doing, you may not even need to encode it. And per the wikipedia, on average, a file is expected to grow about 37% when you base64 encode it, which is almost exactly what your numbers are.

[Siddesh Basapura]

Hi Guys,

Thanks for the replay.
Now i come to know how BASE64 encoder will works by looking you replay and after gone through the wiki link "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64#Examples".