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chore: use data-encoding arg to ensure data is not corrupted #806

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Aug 14, 2018
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chore: use data-encoding arg to ensure data is not corrupted #806

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7 changes: 6 additions & 1 deletion src/object/get.js
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Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -41,12 +41,17 @@ module.exports = (send) => {

send({
path: 'object/get',
args: cidB58Str
args: cidB58Str,
qs: {
'data-encoding': 'base64'
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@alanshaw quick question: what values are allowed here?
Ones from https://github.com/multiformats/multibase/blob/master/multibase.csv ?

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At the moment go-ipfs supports text and base64.

Go's text is the default (e.g. raw bytes), though go-ipfs doesn't escape the characters so it's http api can produce strings that are invalid in JSON and hard to replicate in JavaScript so base64 is safer.

Once ipfs/js-ipfs#1420 is in, js-ipfs will support whatever Buffer.toString([encoding[, start[, end]]]) does.

If we want to add all of the different encodings from that csv it should be pretty straightforward once both implementations support the data-encoding argument.

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Thanks @achingbrain!

This PR reminded me of yEnc from Usenet days, so I was just looking at efficiency column in encoding standards comparison and things like Ascii85 (used in PDFs and git patch) looked interesting (due to moderate adoption and smaller overhead, eg. 25% instead of 33%).

..but then i remembered that HTTP API is often gzipped which means any gains introduced by more exotic encoding than Base64 go away.

For example: base-64 seems to compress better than base-122 🙃

}
}, (err, result) => {
if (err) {
return callback(err)
}

result.Data = Buffer.from(result.Data, 'base64')

const links = result.Links.map((l) => {
return new DAGLink(l.Name, l.Size, Buffer.from(bs58.decode(l.Hash)))
})
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