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I tried to understand it from RFC and from source code (mainly from gnupg and gpgme) and I didn't get the way the data should be stored when someone export secret keys.

I know there should be differences between RSA and DSA/ElGamal storage, but there should be a common way.

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My question was not well described. There is in fact the binary and ascii armor format. But what I'm more interested in is the structure of the data. Which is in fact indicated here (after reading for a while and understanding a bit more) : https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4880#section-5.5.3

The DSA/RSA/ElGamal differences are indicated inside it

I used pgpdump (the C implementation) to see it on a .gpg secret keys exported with

gpg --export-secret-keys
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I had always called it "ASCII Armor".

In fact, it's real name is Radix-64

It's Base64 with a few tweaks.

Fully described in RFC-4880

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    Note that the "armor" layer is optional -- storing keys in binary is not uncommon.
    – grawity_u1686
    Commented Apr 22, 2012 at 18:21
  • 1
    My question was not well described. There is in fact the binary and ascii armor format. But what I'm more interested in is the structure of the data. Which is in fact indicated here (after reading for a while and understanding a bit more) : tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4880#section-5.5.3
    – Dolanor
    Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 13:17

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