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

Just to add the resource and complexity standpoint to the discussion. Since doing PUT/POST and PATCH for storing new resources and altering them, one should remember that the content transfer is an exact representation of the content that is stored and that is received by issuing a GET operation.

A multi-part message is often used as a savior but for simplicity reason and for more complex tasks, I prefer the idea of giving the content as a whole. It is self-explaining and it is simple.

And yes JSON is something crippling but in the end JSON itself is verbose. And the overhead of mapping to BASE64 is a way to small.

Using Multi-Part messages correctly one has to either dismantle the object to send, use a property path as the parameter name for automatic combination or will need to create another protocol/format to just express the payload.

Also liking the BSON approach, this is not that widely and easily supported as one would like it to be.

Basically, we just miss something here but embedding binary data as base64 is well established and way to go unless you really have identified the need to do the real binary transfer (which is hardly often the case).