What is the difference between ASCII and Binary mode?

HTML (or text based files) should be transferred in ASCII mode. All executable programs, compressed files, and image/picture files should be transferred in Binary mode.

Uploading text-based files in Binary mode will append ^M's to the end of every line. With HTML files, your browser will ignore the appended file name. However, other text files such as CGI scripts will not. Uploading CGI scripts in binary will damage them, causing a server 500 error. Damage will occur because binary mode has added ^M's to the end of every line - characters that are not supposed to be in the program.

If you try to upload an image in ASCII mode, you will see a garbled mess of coding on the page where the image is was to have appeared. ASCII mode, in this case, has corrupted the binary coding in the .jpg or .gif image.

NOTE: If you should accidentally load an image in ASCII mode, just re-upload it in Binary format.

REMEMBER: Upload HTML documents in ASCII mode. Upload Perl, etc., scripts in ASCII mode. Anything that you can view with a text editing program should be transferred in ASCII mode. Binary files such as gif or jpeg images, zip files, executables, etc should be transferred in BINARY mode.