Editing BinHex (section)

=== Compact BinHex ===

The simplicity of the original BinHex format made it inefficient, expanding every [[byte]] of input into two, as required by the hexadecimal representation, an 8-to-4 bit encoding. Lempereur implemented a new 8-to-6 bit encoding, which decreased file size by 50% and expanded the checksum from 8 to 16-bits, releasing this as BinHex 2.0.{{sfn|Lempereur|1997}}

The new encoding used the first 64 ASCII printing characters, including the space, to represent the data, similarly to [[uuencoding]]. As the smaller files were incompatible with the older format, Lempereur changed the file extension to {{code|.hcx}}, with ''c'' meaning ''compact''. The name BinHex did not change, despite the format no longer being a hexadecimal representation.{{sfn|Lempereur|1997}}