Novice question on encoding Base64

Hank Nussbacher <troi!HANK@vm.biu.ac.il> Thu, 27 May 1993 14:04 UTC

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From: Hank Nussbacher <troi!HANK@vm.biu.ac.il>
Newsgroups: comp.mail.mime,info.ietf.smtp
Subject: Novice question on encoding Base64
Message-Id: <93147.131715HANK@vm.biu.ac.il>
Date: Thu, 27 May 1993 12:49:05 +0000
Organization: Bar-Ilan University Computing Center, Israel
Lines: 12

Suppose I have text of 151 octets.  This translates into a quantum of
1208 bits.  According to page 16 of RFC1341, I need to pad it with
zero bits until I get a full 6 bit group, so I add a 4 zero bit pad to make
the quantum 1212 bits long.  So far, so good.  Now how many '=' pads
do I have to add?  I didn't fully understand page 16.  If I check
1212 against 24, I am left with a remainder of 12, which doesn't fall
into the 8bit or 16bit remainder spec detailed there.

I am missing something.

Thanks,
Hank Nussbacher