Binary Data in JSON String. Something better than Base64

Question

The JSON format natively doesn\'t support binary data. The binary data has to be escaped so that it can be placed into a string element (i.e. zero or more Unicode chars in d

Answer 1

yEnc might work for you:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yenc

"yEnc is a binary-to-text encoding scheme for transferring binary files in [text]. It reduces the overhead over previous US-ASCII-based encoding methods by using an 8-bit Extended ASCII encoding method. yEnc's overhead is often (if each byte value appears approximately with the same frequency on average) as little as 1–2%, compared to 33%–40% overhead for 6-bit encoding methods like uuencode and Base64. ... By 2003 yEnc became the de facto standard encoding system for binary files on Usenet."

However, yEnc is an 8-bit encoding, so storing it in a JSON string has the same problems as storing the original binary data — doing it the naïve way means about a 100% expansion, which is worse than base64.