Binary
The Binary module is designed to support the processing, within XPath/XQuery/XSLT, of fundamentally binary data, found in situations such as inspecting images (for size and metadata), processing files which contain different text sections in different encodings and more esoteric subjects such as manipulating large cryptographic keys, or generating PDF files.
It comprises a small set of extension functions for XPath/XQuery expressions that enable binary data (i.e. potentially large sequences of bytes) to be created, reduced to byte sequences, manipulated as bit-strings, joined into larger sequences, split, extended and searched. Functions are provided to convert to and from numeric forms, and text strings via encoding protocols.
Test-suites are available for developers to verify implementations. Some samples using the module are provided in the specification - other more sizeable ones should hopefully appear in the Samples area of this section of the website.
