Basic Encoding Rules
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Basic encoding rules (BER) are ASN.1 encoding rules for producing self-identifying and self-delimiting transfer syntax for data structures described in ASN.1 notations.
BER is a self-identifying and self-delimiting encoding scheme, which means that each data value can be identified, extracted and decoded individually.
You view it as a kind of "binary" XML. Currently effort is being made to join these two technologies, such as the XML Encoding Rules (an alternative to BER), ASN.1 Schema (an alternative to XML Schema), ASN.1 SOAP (to exchange XML with PER on web services), et cetera.
Huw Rogers once described BER as "a triumph of bloated theory over clean implementation". He also criticises it as designed around bitstreams with arbitrary boundaries between data which can only be determined at a high level.
Documents: ITU-T X.690, ISO 8825-1.
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- This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL.