I'm using Grails 1.3.7. I have some code that uses the built-in base64Encode function and base64Decode function. It all works fine in simple test cases where I encode some binary data and then decode the resulting string and write it to a new file. In this case the files are identical.
But then I wrote a web service that took the base64 encoded data as a parameter in a POST call. Although the length of the base64 data is identical to the string I passed into the function, the contents of the base64 data are being modified. I spend DAYS debugging this and finally wrote a test controller that passed the data in base64 to post and also took the name of a local file with the correct base64 encoded data, as in:
data=AAA-base-64-data...&testFilename=/name/of/file/with/base64data
Within the test function I compared every byte in the incoming data parameter with the appropriate byte in the test file. I found that somehow every "+" character in the input data parameter had been replaced with a " " (space, ordinal ascii 32). Huh? What could have done that?
To be sure I was correct, I added a line that said:
data = data.replaceAll(' ', '+')
and sure enough the data decoded exactly right. I tried it with arbitrarily long binary files and it now works every time. But I can't figure out for the life of me what would be modifying the data parameter in the post to convert the ord(43) character to ord(32)? I know that the plus sign is one of the 2 somewhat platform dependent characters in the base64 spec, but given that I am doing the encoding and decoding on the same machine for now I am super puzzled what caused this. Sure I have a "fix" since I can make it work, but I am nervous about "fixes" that I don't understand.
The code is too big to post here, but I get the base64 encoding like so:
def inputFile = new File(inputFilename)
def rawData = inputFile.getBytes()
d