resulting base64 in http-client is wrong

The query imports base64, but it's not used explicitly anywhere. How does the query "know" to output in base64?

>> The query imports base64, but it's not used explicitly anywhere.
Sorry, my fault. I forgot to remove the unused module.

>> How does the query "know" to output in base64?
I do not really understand. The results of file:read-binary and http-client:send-request($request)[2] are base64 items. Therefore, the query outputs base64, no?

Why should the results be base64 items? The results should be raw binary data. If printed to a terminal, I should expect to get what looks like garbage but is in fact the raw binary data. base64 is a TEXT representation of binary data.

The default serialization of zorba is XML (I guess). Therefore, it cannot return binary data. Therefore, it returns the base64 string. I think zorba doesn't have an option to use binary serialization. Right?

I figured out part of the problem. The HTTP spec says that the default character encoding is ISO 8859-1, so in my previous change, I always set the character encoding to that. If you specify an override-media-type such as "application/octet-stream" but do NOT include a character encoding, it therefore defaults to ISO 8859-1 that, in this case, is wrong. The bytes need to pass through untouched.

I therefore think I need to make it so that if you provide NO "charset=..." in the override-media-type, then the character encoding shall remain empty and no transcoding will take place.

It seems your investigation makes sense. However, I think that the solution should be to not do any transcoding for any non-textual content (even if the user gives one).

@David: I don't think we should call the concept of decoding base64Binary a serialization method. IMHO, decoding doesn't have anything to do with the serializer. It's an orthogonal concept. For example, the file module provides file:write-binary functions that implicitly decode base64Binary items.