Editing Uuencoding (section)

== Relation to xxencode, Base64, and Ascii85 ==
{{Main|xxencoding|Base64|Ascii85}}

Despite its limited range of characters, uuencoded data is sometimes corrupted on passage through certain computers using non-ASCII character sets such as [[EBCDIC]]. One attempt to solve the problem was the xxencode format, which used only alphanumeric characters and the plus and minus symbols. More common today is the Base64 format, which is based on the same concept of [[alphanumeric]]-only as opposed to ASCII 32–95. All three formats use 6&nbsp;bits (64 different characters) to represent their input data.

Base64 can also be generated by the uuencode program and is similar in format, except for the actual character translation:

The header is changed to
 begin-base64 &lt;mode> &lt;file>
the trailer becomes
 {{=}}{{=}}{{=}}{{=}}
and lines between are encoded with characters chosen from
 ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP
 QRSTUVWXYZabcdef
 ghijklmnopqrstuv
 wxyz0123456789+/

Another alternative is [[Ascii85]], which encodes four binary characters in five ASCII characters. Ascii85 is used in [[PostScript]] and [[PDF]] formats.