Base64 guides

Python Base64 Encoding and Decoding

Python's built-in base64 module handles bytes, files, and URL-safe values without third-party packages. Text should be encoded to UTF-8 bytes explicitly.

Text example

import base64; encoded=base64.b64encode('Hello, 世界'.encode('utf-8')).decode('ascii'); plain=base64.b64decode(encoded).decode('utf-8')

Files and streams

Read small files as bytes; process large files in chunks and write encoded output incrementally. Handle invalid Base64 separately from UnicodeDecodeError.

URL-safe values

urlsafe_b64encode replaces plus and slash with URL-friendly characters. Test results with the decoder.