I think the Right Thing is to allow whitespace but not other random characters in base64->bytestring; I've modified my current draft accordingly. That allows it to process material broken into lines, but raises an exception if other junk is found.

On Sat, Oct 3, 2020 at 9:05 PM Wolfgang Corcoran-Mathe <xxxxxx@sigwinch.xyz> wrote:

Hi all,

According to the latest version of the SRFI document in John's repo,
base64->bytestring (previously known as base64->bytevector) raises an
error if its string argument "is not in base-64 format". The sample
implementation currently uses chibi-scheme's base64 decoding routines,
which are permissive in that they skip over embedded newlines and
other "outside" characters in base-64 strings. Is this--allowing at
least a subset of outside characters, whitespace in particular--a
desirable feature for base64->bytestring? If not, I'll rewrite the
base64->bytestring implementation to reject strings containing non
base-64 characters, to comply with John's new text.

Regards,

--
Wolfgang Corcoran-Mathe <xxxxxx@sigwinch.xyz>

"A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost
of nothing." --Alan J. Perlis