xxencoding

xxencode is a binary-to-text encoding similar to uuencode which uses only the alphanumeric characters, and the plus and minus signs.

It was invented as a means to transfer files in a format which would survive character set translation, particularly that between ASCII and the EBCDIC encoding used on IBM mainframes.

[1] xxencoded data starts with a line of the form: Where is the file's read/write/execute permissions as three octal digits, and is the name to be used when recreating the binary data.

If the input is not evenly divisible by 45, the last line will contain the remaining N output characters, preceded by the number of remaining input bytes encoded as above.

This assumes at least one full-length line (45 encoded bytes/60 characters) in the output.