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Elektra 0.11.0
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The Base64 Encoding (specified in RFC4648) is used to encode arbitrary binary data to ASCII strings.
This is useful for configuration files that must contain ASCII strings only.
The base64
plugin encodes binary values before kdb set
writes the configuration to the file. The values are decoded back to their original value after kdb get
has read from the configuration file.
To mount a simple backend that uses the Base64 encoding, you can use:
. To unmount the plugin use the following command:
. All encoded binary values will look something like this:
. And for a null-key it will be:
The plugin supports two different modes:
. By default the plugin uses escaping mode which has the advantage that a storage plugin does not have to change its behavior at all to work in conjunction with Base64.
In order to identify the base64 encoded content, the values are marked with the prefix @BASE64
. To distinguish between the @
as character and @
as Base64 marker, all strings starting with @
will be modified so that they begin with @@
.
The following example shows how you can use this plugin together with the TOML plugin to store binary data.
Some file formats such as YAML already support Base64 encoded data. In YAML binary data starts with the tag !!binary
followed by a Base64 encoded scalar:
. For YAML it would not make sense to use the format of the escaping mode:
. Base64 supports another mode called “meta mode”. In this mode the Base64 plugin encodes the value, but does not add a prefix. To use the escaping mode a plugin must add the configuration key /binary/meta
. Afterwards the Base64 plugin encodes and decodes all data that contains the metakey type
with the value binary
.
The diagram below shows how the Base64 conversion process works in conjunction with the YAML CPP plugin.
The following example shows you how you can use the TOML plugin together with Base64’s meta mode.
For another usage example, please take a look at the ReadMe of the YAML CPP plugin.