Base64 encoding software#

The first 64 characters out of the 65-character subset are mapped to an equivalent 6-bit binary sequence ( 2 6 = 64). The Base64 encoding is described in the RFC 4648.īase64 encoding works with a 65-character subset of the US-ASCII charset.

Base64 encoding software#

The friend’s email software will Base64-decode the above encoded textual data to restore the original binary image. For example, when you send an email containing an image to your friend, your email software Base64 encodes the image and inserts the equivalent text into the message like so -Ĭontent-Disposition: inline filename =favicon-16x16.png Although, It was later extended to support non US-ASCII text messages as well as non-text messages such as audio and images, It is still recommended to encode the data to ASCII charset for backward compatibility.īase64 encoding encodes any binary data or non-ASCII text data to printable ASCII format so that it can be safely transmitted over any communication channel. One example of such a system is Email (SMTP), which was traditionally designed to work with plain text data in the 7-bit US-ASCII character set. It represents binary data in a printable ASCII string format by translating it into a radix-64 representation.īase64 encoding is commonly used when there is a need to transmit binary data over media that do not correctly handle binary data and is designed to deal with textual data belonging to the 7-bit US-ASCII charset only. Base64 is a binary-to-text encoding scheme.