R. David Murray added the comment:
This has been discussed numerous times. There are just as many times when you
want the output to be binary (because you are about to send it on the wire).
However, the deciding factor is that the API is now what it is, and changing it
at this point would be
New submission from Lucas Clemente Vella:
As stated in RFC 3548:
Base encoding of data is used in many situations to store or transfer
data in environments that, perhaps for legacy reasons, are restricted
to only US-ASCII [9] data.
thus, I was surprised to see, when I used base64 for t
