Base 64 ENcoder / Basic Authorization

With the Free & Online Base64 Encode tool, you can effortlessly encode the decoded Base64 string or decode the Base64 encoded string into a human-readable format.

Base64 is simply a binary to ASCII encoding scheme. That encoding scheme is used to store and transfer the binary data over the medium, designed to deal with textual data, and does not support binary data. Such as when embedding an image into a database, CSS files, or HTML.

A base64 encoded string looks like this: R3JlZXRpbmcgYnkgdXJsLWRlY29kZS5jb20=

Base64 encoding scheme uses the same 64 characters that are present in the majority of character sets. Therefore, these are not used as controlled characters on the internet. So when you encode with Base64, you are confident that your data will decode at the destination without any issue.

These characters are

• Upper case alphabet characters A-Z.
• Lower case alphabet characters a-z.
• Number characters 0–9.
• Characters + and /.
• The character = is used for padding.

Bytes that formed the data are broken into 24 bits (3*8, three bytes at a time). These three bytes (24 bits) are broken into four packs of 6 bits each. Those 6 bits form a number corresponding to the index in the character set supported by the Base64 encoding scheme. 

But what if the number of characters to be encoded does not come with a multiple of six bits?

Then zeros will be added to complete the last six-bit sequence.

If the number of bytes is not in numbers of three, then padding is used;

== for 1 byte  and = 2 bytes

In simple, Base64 encoding converts the three bytes of data into four base64 encoded characters.

Some major Base64 implementations are.

• It is used to store and transfer the data without any feat of data corruption.
• It is used to embed the files within the web pages and scripts to avoid external file dependency.
• It is used to obfuscate the data, even though the final result is not human-readable. But it cannot be used as a security mechanism because it can be decoded.
• Data hashing schemes like SHA and MD5 often produce results that are not human-readable and transferable. Therefore, the hash data is usually converted to Base64 encoded form to be displayed readily. 

The Base64 encoding scheme is widely used and preferred over the other encoding schemes like HEX encoding and Decimal encoding because

• It includes the 64 characters that are present in the majority of character sets. Therefore, these are not used as controlled characters on the internet. So when you encode with Base64, you are confident that your data will arrive at the destination without interruption.
• The HEX encoding scheme encodes each byte into the Hex pair, resulting in two bytes after encoding.
• In the Decimal encoding, each byte of data would represent three numbers. That means each byte of encoded data would result in three bytes of data.

To encode the data by using the Base64 encoding scheme. Perform the following steps.

• Open the Free & Online Base64 Encode tool. 
• You can copy and paste the data you wish to encoded in the box above.
• After pasting the data, click on the ENcode button.
• The tool will convert the provided data into Base64 encoded format.
• Please copy the resulted data, and paste it into the desired location.
• You can decode the data that you have just encoded by using the Free & Online Base64 Decode tool.