Need to decrypt that garbled text string you got in an email? Or data encoded in a configuration file? Concerned about the security of that data? My base64 encoder/decoder process the request in your browser with javascript, so your data doesn't touch my server.
"Base64" can refer to a variety of encoding types that take binary data and convert it to text for safe transport over systems like email that do not guarantee safe transit of binary data. The name Base64 comes from the MIME content-transfer-encoding that uses this scheme. 64 refers to the 64 characters that are used to represent the encoded data. Most Base64 encoding schemes use A–Z, a–z, and 0–9 for the first 62 characters. The last two characters may differ between encodings; the MIME specification uses
But my text got longer when I encoded it. What's up with that? Yes, base64 encoded text is longer than the unencoded text it represents. Text is generally stored in a computer system with a bit depth of 2 7 or 128 possible values per position. Base64, as its name implies, has to represent all of those values with a bit depth of only 64 or 2 6 , so one character in the source text is shared between characters of the encoded text. It's probably easiest to show how this works visually: