Binary Data in JSON String. Something better than Base64

Question

The JSON format natively doesn\'t support binary data. The binary data has to be escaped so that it can be placed into a string element (i.e. zero or more Unicode chars in d

Answer 1

While it is true that base64 has ~33% expansion rate, it is not necessarily true that processing overhead is significantly more than this: it really depends on JSON library/toolkit you are using. Encoding and decoding are simple straight-forward operations, and they can even be optimized wrt character encoding (as JSON only supports UTF-8/16/32) -- base64 characters are always single-byte for JSON String entries. For example on Java platform there are libraries that can do the job rather efficiently, so that overhead is mostly due to expanded size.

I agree with two earlier answers:

• base64 is simple, commonly used standard, so it is unlikely to find something better specifically to use with JSON (base-85 is used by postscript etc; but benefits are at best marginal when you think about it)
• compression before encoding (and after decoding) may make lots of sense, depending on data you use