FTP modes (ASCII Vs Binary)

balaji2u

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Am pointing some of the faimiliar differences between the ASCII and Binary transfer modes in FTP.
Both transfer methods will transfer bit by bit.
However,
ASCII mode transfers also convert characters between systems (and sometimes just delete them) however, binary file transfers are just directly transferred with no modification. The point of ASCII transfer is to ensure an ASCII file will work on both systems. It will convert carriage return characters from a windows system to the standard line break characters for *nix systems. It will also do other ascii character conversions. You can normally do a binary file transfer on ASCII files (txt, php, html, xml, etc.) and it will work okay. However, doing an ASCII transfer of a binary file (jpeg, png, mp3, wav, mpg... anything that can't be opened as readable in notepad, vim or your preferred text editor) will result in a corrupted file as the ASCII conversion will pick up parts of the binary that represent ASCII characters.
 
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