I didn't quite know what to put for the title, as this program I'm writing is kind of hard to describe...
Basically, it's a program that converts a folder of your game projects into a pure text file. Then you could copy and paste the contents of that file into a post here. Then, anyone that wants to use that program/game/whatever can copy that post into a file, download the free unpacker I wrote for it, and it then unpacks the files into their original state!
Basically, it's a program that converts a folder of your game projects into a pure text file. Then you could copy and paste the contents of that file into a post here. Then, anyone that wants to use that program/game/whatever can copy that post into a file, download the free unpacker I wrote for it, and it then unpacks the files into their original state!
Posting converted binary text in a forum would be a massively bad idea, since I'm sure that BRL isn't exactly waiting to store who knows how many MB of data in their database that's undoubtedbly not designed with that in mind. 'normal' postings are a few hundred or maybe a couple of thousand characters in size. If you start posting binary files, those messages could be hundreds or even thousands of times the size of a typical posting, putting a much higher load on the database server, very long load times, massively increased bandwidth (every user looking at the thread essentially downloads the file each time they look)
Gives all those downsides, I'm sure that posting converted binary files on the forum will get one banned in no time.
Anyway, if you do have a real reason to convert binary info to text format (which does not involve posting it on the forum), then there is no reason to reinvent the wheel -- there are already several established standards that do exactly that:
- UUencode/UUdecode
- MIME
- Base64: http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=49450
Note that email doesn't support binary files either, and all email clients use one of the above variants to convert the binary file to text and include it in the body of the message. The email client itself hides this from the user and shows the 'attached' documents, but from the internet's point of view those attachments are plain text just like everything else.