11.14. Built-in Module binascii

The binascii module defines the following functions:

a2b_uu (string) -- function of module binascii

Convert a single line of uuencoded data back to binary and return the binary data. Lines normally contain 45 (binary) bytes, except for the last line. Line data may be followed by whitespace.

b2a_uu (data) -- function of module binascii

Convert binary data to a line of ascii characters, the return value is the converted line, including a newline char. The length of data should be at most 45.

a2b_base64 (string) -- function of module binascii

Convert a block of base64 data back to binary and return the binary data. More than one line may be passed at a time.

b2a_base64 (data) -- function of module binascii

Convert binary data to a line of ascii characters in base64 coding. The return value is the converted line, including a newline char. The length of data should be at most 57 to adhere to the base64 standard.

a2b_hqx (string) -- function of module binascii

Convert binhex4 formatted ascii data to binary, without doing rle-decompression. The string should contain a complete number of binary bytes, or (in case of the last portion of the binhex4 data) have the remaining bits zero.

rledecode_hqx (data) -- function of module binascii

Perform RLE-decompression on the data, as per the binhex4 standard. The algorithm uses 0x90 after a byte as a repeat indicator, followed by a count. A count of 0 specifies a byte value of 0x90. The routine returns the decompressed data, unless data input data ends in an orphaned repeat indicator, in which case the Incomplete exception is raised.

rlecode_hqx (data) -- function of module binascii

Perform binhex4 style RLE-compression on data and return the result.

b2a_hqx (data) -- function of module binascii

Perform hexbin4 binary-to-ascii translation and return the resulting string. The argument should already be rle-coded, and have a length divisible by 3 (except possibly the last fragment).

crc_hqx (data, crc) -- function of module binascii

Compute the binhex4 crc value of data, starting with an initial crc and returning the result.

Error -- exception of module binascii

Exception raised on errors. These are usually programming errors.

Incomplete -- exception of module binascii

Exception raised on incomplete data. These are usually not programming errors, but handled by reading a little more data and trying again.