How does encoding work?
All encoding methods (uuencode, xxencode, base64 and binhex), except yEnc, use the same basic principle: they replace every 3 bytes of the original binary file with 4 bytes from an encoding table that contains only textual codes. It is a bit more complex than that, but this is the idea. When you download an encoded file from the Usenet, your decoder performs the reverse transformation and you end up with the original binary file. Please note that the size of the encoded file is at least 33% larger than the size of the original binary file.
