Thank you! This is very helpful. As to the bytes of an integer, I would assume that, since I always get one byte, its size is not 8 bits. In this case, I should also get values bigger than 255, but I cannot actually get that, no matter what the value of the integer is (e.g., convert:integers-to-base64(34777) => convert:binary-to-integers() ). I notice that the result for int 0 is 0 and for int 256 is also 0: it seems it alway outputs octet values, even if we need more than 1 octet.
On Aug 14, 2019, at 9:54 AM, Michael Seiferle ms@basex.org wrote:
Hi Guiseppe,
- You are right, it’s not too obvious what’s happening here:
In BaseX the default serialization mode is „basex“ which tries to return items in a more readable way, hence internally your string is represented as xs:base64Binary — but when it is output to the query results panel it will be serialized according to whichever serialization is active; we opted for our custom serialization as we considered it to be a sane default, as it is able to serialize() all kinds of items (i.e. XML serialization won’t serialize maps or arrays) and is generally a little more readable than adaptive because we omit type information such as xs:base64Binary("c8Ogw6A=")
The following query serializes your value with different serialization parameters.
let $it := convert:string-to-base64("sàà")
for $method in ( "basex", "xml", "adaptive", "json", "text","html" ) return element { $method } { serialize( $it, map{ "method": $method } ) }
- The length method basically tells you how many bytes your string needs to be encoded as utf8, you may use the following query and try it yourself:
let $str := "•" let $bin := convert:string-to-base64($str) return element _ { element str { $str }, element b64 { $bin }, element octets { attribute length { bin:length($bin) }, for $byte in $bin => convert:binary-to-integers() return element octet { $byte => convert:integer-to-base(2) } } }
Depending on the input string and it’s encoding (i.e. ‚a' will only need one byte, but ‚ä' already needs two, ‚•' will even need three in utf8) your string is converted to xs:base64Binary and the bin:length() function will count how many octets are needed for this representation.
Hope this helps :-)
Best Michael
Am 14.08.2019 um 02:22 schrieb Giuseppe G. A. Celano <celano@informatik.uni-leipzig.de mailto:celano@informatik.uni-leipzig.de>:
Hi
I am playing around with the binary module. I have two simple questions:
convert:string-to-base64("sàà") returns sàà : what does it mean? I see in the documentation that I need to use string() to see the value of xs:base64Binary (c8Ogw6A=), but shouldn't xs:base64Binary already be outputted as c8Ogw6A= ? (This is actually displayed in the Info Panel).
bin:length(convert:integers-to-base64(x)) always returns one number, no matter how big the number is. In the documentation I read that the output of bin:length should be the size of binary data in octects: how is that possible?
Thanks, Giuseppe