NAME

       trf-intro - Introduction to Trf

SYNOPSIS

       package require Tcl  ?8.2?

       package require Trf  ?2.1.3?

DESCRIPTION

       The package Trf provides a number of commands which take data and transform them in various ways.

BACKGROUND

       The  implementation  of  Trf  began  as  proof-of-concept  of the validity and usefulness of the "stacked
       channel" patches to the core. These patches allow the writing of extensions to the generic I/O system  of
       the core which are able to intercept all read/write operations on designated channels, thus giving it the
       ability to transform the data flowing through these channels as desired.

       This allows things like transparent encryption, compression, charset recoding, etc.

       Since version 8.2 of the tcl core the aforementioned patches are part of the tcl  core  itself,  changing
       the status of trf from "extension requiring core patches" to "normal extension".

       Other packages built upon either the stackd channels directly, or Trf are:

       [1]    TrfCrypt, by myself, contains various encryption systems

       [2]    TLS, an SSL/TLS implementation by Matt Newman.

       [3]    Tcl MIME by Marshall Rose.

API

       The  commands provide by trf can be placed into the three categories listed below. Note that all commands
       are added to the global namespace.

       Encodings
              The encoding commands either take some data and return the same data  in  encoded  form,  or  take
              encoded data and return a decoded result.

              [1]    oct

              [2]    hex

              [3]    oct

              [4]    base64

              [5]    uuencode

              [6]    ascii85

              [7]    otp_words

              [8]    quoted-printable

       Message Digests
              The  second  category  are message digests in general, simple ones like crc, and cryptographically
              strong algorithms like md5.

              [1]    crc-zlib

              [2]    crc

              [3]    adler

              [4]    md2

              [5]    md5

              [6]    md5_otp

              [7]    sha

              [8]    sha1

              [9]    sha1_otp

              [10]   haval

              [11]   ripemd-160

              [12]   ripemd-128

       Miscellaneous
              At last a number of commands not readily  placed  into  categories  providing  password  crypting,
              general transformations, data compression, error correction and others.

              [1]    crypt

              [2]    md5crypt

              [3]    transform

              [4]    rs_ecc

              [5]    zip

              [6]    bz2

              [7]    unstack

SEE ALSO

       adler,  ascii85,  base64,  bz2,  crc,  crc-zlib,  crypt,  haval,  hex,  md2, md5, md5_otp, md5crypt, oct,
       otp_words, quoted-printable, ripemd-128, ripemd-160, rs_ecc, sha, sha1,  sha1_otp,  transform,  uuencode,
       zip

KEYWORDS

       compression, encoding, error correction, message digest, transformation

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright (c) 1996-2003, Andreas Kupries <andreas_kupries@users.sourceforge.net>