Ed,

>> base 64 should work with any charset.

E> I'm new to even thinking about character sets, so these may be easy
E> questions--is base 64 OCTETS?

Base64 is a way to encode binary that so that it becomes printable, at
the cost of an increase in size.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64

Most if not all development environments have tools to do Base64
encoding and decoding.

Ciao
--
Nando Dessena
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