What Is Base64?
Base64 is a way in which 8-bit binary data is encoded into a format that can be represented in 7 bits. This is done using only the characters A-Z, a-z, 0-9, +, and / in order to represent data, with = used to pad data. For instance, using this encoding, three 8-bit bytes are converted into four 7-bit bytes.
The term Base64 is taken from the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) standard, which is widely used for HTTP and XML, and was originally developed for encoding email attachments for transmission.
Why Do We Use Base64?
Base64 is very important for binary data representation, such that it allows binary data to be represented in a way that looks and acts as plain text, which makes it more reliable to be stored in databases, sent in emails, or used in text-based format such as XML. Base64 is basically used for representing data in an ASCII string format.
Code Snippet
import base64
# Encode string data
def stringToBase64(s):
return base64.b64encode(s.encode('utf-8'))
def base64ToString(b):
return base64.b64decode(b).decode('utf-8')
# Encode binary file data
def fileToBase64(filepath):
fp = open(filepath, "rb")
data = fp.read()
fp.close()
return base64.b64encode(data).decode('utf-8')