Editing Binary file (section)

== Manipulation ==

To send binary files through certain systems (such as [[email]]) that do not allow all data values, they are often translated into a plain text representation (using, for example, [[Base64]]). Encoding the data has the disadvantage of increasing the file size during the transfer (for example, using Base64 will increase the file's size by approximately 30%), as well as requiring translation back into binary after receipt. The increased size may be countered by lower-level link compression, as the resulting text data will have about as much less [[Entropy (information theory)|entropy]] as it has increased size, so the actual data transferred in this scenario would likely be very close to the size of the original binary data. See [[Binary-to-text encoding]] for more on this subject.

[[Microsoft Windows]] and its standard libraries for the [[C (programming language)|C]] and [[C++]] programming languages allow the programmer to specify a parameter indicating if a file is expected to be plain text or binary when opening a file; this affects the standard library calls to read and write from the file in that the system converts between the C/C++ "end of line" character (the ASCII linefeed character) and the end-of-line sequence Windows expects in files (the ASCII [[carriage return]] and linefeed characters in sequence). In [[Unix-like]] systems, the C and C++ standard libraries on those systems also allow the programmer to specify whether a file is expected to be text or binary, but the libraries can and do ignore that parameter, as the end-of-line sequence in Unix-like systems is just the C/C++ end-of-line character.