Puppet doesn't do base64, it sends a long string of \x123\x321 etc (this is the actual string it sends, those are not hex chars but their readable form).
Wow, what a terrible piece of software -- though I suppose it's pretty typical for Ruby, with its mix of historical ignorance and inefficiency. We've known how to encode binary data as ASCII text with reasonable line lengths for a long time: it's called "uuencode," and pack and unpack handle it just fine.

In reply to Re^3: Load large(ish) files with YAML? by educated_foo
in thread Load large(ish) files with YAML? by rgcosma

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