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Sure, but it’s still a bad default IMO, the expected behavior would be an unformatted string without any linebreaks

For old farts like me who used to use News groups where binary data was first encoded in uuencode and later with the innovative base64, it is totally expected behavior.

Also look into the text files für the public/private keys. It is always this, because the screen has only 80 characters in width.

So you pass in a 1gig binary you want a very, very long line of text that many text editors would choke on?

The purpose of base64 is to turn binary into text that can be embedded in normal text messages such as email and Usenet. A right margin of about 80 characters is very much what one should expect such a tool to default to.

If you're passing a 1GB binary to base64 you're ... incredibly unlikely to be dealing with the resulting base64 manually (copypaste, text editor, whatever). So, yes, the expected default would still be no linebreaks.

The primary purpose of these tools have changed over time as the environment has changed. You know nobody uses usenet anymore, and nobody copypastes base64 into emails anymore, right?

The default will not be changed because it breaks the original use cases. Which some people still have even if you do not.

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