| Binary to ASCII (Text) Conversion. A binary-to-text encoding is encoding of data in plain text. More precisely, it is an encoding of binary data in a sequence of ASCII-printable characters. These encodings are necessary for transmission of data when the channel or the protocol only allows ASCII-printable characters, such as e-mail or usenet. PGP documentation (RFC 2440) uses the term ASCII armor for binary-to-text encoding when referring to Radix-64. The ASCII text-encoding standard uses 128 unique values (0–127) to represent the alphabetic, numeric, and punctuation characters commonly used in English, plus a selection of control codes which do not represent printable characters. For example, the capital letter A is ASCII character 65, the numeral 2 is ASCII 50, the character } is ASCII 125, and the metacharacter carriage return is ASCII 13. Systems based on ASCII use seven bits to represent these values digitally. |