JSON is not binary

[mcandre]

JSON should not be binary?. It is written and stored as plain text, usually ASCII or UTF-8.

BSON is binary.

[mcandre]

A Redditor pointed out to me that #binary? in mime-types means something closer to "network transport set to base64".

http://rubydoc.org/gems/mime-types/MIME/Type#binary%3F-instance_method

Does the mime-types library offer another method to access this information?

[halostatue]

You can get that directly from encoding. This bit of the code may need revisiting, but I'm not sure how people use it (it's part of the original code translated from the Perl about ten years ago).

[halostatue]

Before I make this sort of change, I really have to look at how people are using mime-types. #71 indicates that people were using the list of extensions to find a preferred extension, and I don’t think I had ever considered that.

[halostatue]

After further consideration, #ascii? and #binary? will be remaining as-is because the domain usage is accurate. The data contained in this library doesn’t really indicate whether the information is textual, structured textual, or some sort of binary encoding. One thing that was pointed out to me is that the JSON spec does not specify UTF-8 or ASCII as its encoding, but any valid Unicode—so it could be UTF-32, as well.