[fpc-devel] Base64 decoding stream in the FCL

[Bram Kuijvenhoven]

Hi list!

The Base64 decoding stream in the Base64 unit in the FCL appears to be broken. In particular
- it does not handle whitespace (or other characters not from the bas64 alphabet), and
- Read does not return the correct number of bytes read when at the end of the stream, and
- the meaning of the EOF is a little bit unclear

These bugs can be circumvented by filtering out whitespace first and calling Size [which works!] to determine the actual stream size, but this is of course ugly, slower and not working on non-seekable streams.

I saw there already was a small fix after 2.0.4, but there is going on quite some more.

Note that the source code mentions RFC2045, which is actually about MIME, but also mentions a Base64 Content Transfer Encoding, but that RFC3548 is a preferred source, as it deals with base64 encoding in general. (URLs for RFCs: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3548.txt, http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2045.txt.)

I'd be happy to send a patch for the TBase64Decoding class:
- instead of supporting certain 'magical' Seek operations used in the implementation of TSream.GetSize, override GetSize
- ignore characters not in base64 alphabet and not being '='
- try to fix EOF: it should true iff all bytes have been Read

Any comments or suggestions are welcome!


I also recommend some tests are added to test the base64 decode class. It seems to be rather untested or unreviewed at the moment (no offense!), as I saw e.g. (at line 215)

              for j := i to 3 do
                ReadBuf[i] := ReadBuf[i + 1];

which obviously must be not what the author meant.

I haven't looked at the base64 encoding class in depth; it might have problems too.

Regards,

Bram