Why base64binary

I find an back refered post talking about this "If we don't do this, then there is a risk that certain characters may be improperly interpreted. For e. Show 6 more comments. Sridhar Sarnobat This might be how Microsoft's old. Add a comment. Community Bot 1 1 1 silver badge. So its like with Base64, mostly both the source and destination will interpret the data the same way, because most probably they will interpret these 64 characters the same way, even if they interpret the control characters in different ways.

Is that right? They data may even be destroyed in transit. For example many FTP programs rewrite line endings from 13,10 to 10 or via versa if the operating system of the server and client don't match and the transfer is flagged as text mode. FTP is just the first example that came to my mind, it is not a good one because FTP does support a binary mode. What is a textual media? It is more that the media validates the string encoding, so we want to ensure that the data is acceptable by a handling application and doesn't contain a binary sequence representing EOL for example Imagine you want to send binary data in an email with encoding UTF-8 -- The email may not display correctly if the stream of ones and zeros creates a sequence which isn't valid Unicode in UTF-8 encoding.

Aiden Bell Aiden Bell That's awesome--this explanation made it click. It's not to obfuscate or compress data, but simply to avoid using special sequences that can be interpreted as protocol. Base64 instead of escaping special characters I'll give you a very different but real example: I write javascript code to be run in a browser. With Base64 I can refer to something complicated without worrying about which language allows what special characters and which need escaping: document.

Sridhar Sarnobat Sridhar Sarnobat Bill the Lizard Bill the Lizard k gold badges silver badges bronze badges. It would happen to any XML parser, i. Billy: Yes, absolutely. I just happened to be using a SAX parser for that application. Lazer: Right. Unencoded binary data will have control characters in it just by chance when you try to interpret it as ASCII which in this case it was not. Why is it a problem if stream interrupts after 7 bits. At the end, the other machine will have all the data received over the stream, it can then choose 8 bits format for displaying it?

What's wrong with my mind! A protocol designed to represent text may improperly treat binary data that happens to contain: The bytes 0x0A and 0x0D, used for line endings, which differ by platform. Byte sequences that are invalid UTF In addition to the other somewhat lengthy answers: even ignoring old systems that support only 7-bit ASCII, basic problems with supplying binary data in text-mode are: Newlines are typically transformed in text-mode.

One must be careful not to treat a NUL byte as the end of a text string, which is all too easy to do in any program with C lineage. Base64 Encoding Steps Simplified : Binary data is arranged in continuous chunks of 24 bits 3 bytes each. Each 24 bits chunk is grouped in to four parts of 6 bit each. Each 6 bit group is converted into their corresponding Base64 character values, i.

Base64 encoding converts three octets into four encoded characters. Interestingly, the same characters will be encoded differently depending on their position within the three-octet group which is encoded to produce the four characters. Mushtaq Hussain Mushtaq Hussain 6 6 silver badges 5 5 bronze badges.

Here is a summary of my understanding after reading what others have posted: Important! Update I've written an API for base64 encoding and decoding. Gilboot Gilboot 1, 10 10 silver badges 18 18 bronze badges. Many protocols had a separate text-mode and binary-mode for transferring data, unfortunately email didn't back then.

Text-mode is necessary precisely because no single text encoding ruled the world, not ASCII; every computer network has their own favourite encoding, so there are gateways whose job is to convert the exchanged text to the local encoding so that a Japanese company can send email to an American business consultant without mojibake.

This conversion, obviously, is undesirable when sending binary data. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. By clicking sign up, you agree to receive emails from Techopedia and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Base64 is a binary to text encoding scheme that is generally used to transfer content-based messages over the Internet. It works by dividing every three bits of binary data into six bit units. Because each bit is divided into two bits, the converted data is 33 percent, or one-third, larger than the original data.

By: Dr. By: Kaushik Pal Contributor. Dictionary Dictionary Term of the Day. When encoding , Base64 will divide the string of bytes into groups of 6 bits and each group will map to one of 64 characters. Do you see the pattern? The three - letter string ABC can be interpreted as a bit string that looks like this: We've added these blue lines just to show where the bytes are broken out. To interpret that as base64 , you need to break it into groups of 6 bits. Convert Images to Base64 World's simplest image base64 encoder.

Press button, get base What is base64Binary? Category: technology and computing digital audio. Base64 is a encoding algorithm that allows you to transform any characters into an alphabet which consists of Latin letters, digits, plus, and slash. What is base 32 called? Why is encoding needed?

Is base64 a hash? Is base64 an UTF 8? Is base64 smaller than binary? Why is base64 needed? How do I decode base64? The history of the Base64 started long ago, in those times when engineers argued how many bits should be in a byte.

Now we use eight-bit bytes, but before that were used seven-bit, six-bit, and even three-bit bytes. This led to the fact that some data was simply lost during the transfer between the new and the old systems.

For example, a mail server may discard the eighth bit when sending emails. Moreover, there was another problem with mail servers — they could only send text, but not binary data such as images, video, archives. And so, in a magical way , clever minds develop an algorithm to solve these problems. Of course, over time, other binary-to-text encodings were developed, but thanks to the simplicity, efficiency and portability, Base64 became the most popular and was used almost everywhere.

Since then, the algorithm has evolved, giving rise to new standards that are actively used throughout the world of IT. Since this algorithm uses 64 basic characters it was not difficult to give it a name especially that Base85 already existed.

Therefore, I think it will not be a problem for you to guess what means the names of algorithms such as Base16, Base32, Base36, Base58, Base91, or Base During encoding, the Base64 algorithm replaces each three bytes with four bytes and, if necessary, adds padding characters, so the result will always be a multiple of four. In addition, Base64 is used to encode data that may be unsupported or damaged during transfer, storage, or output.

Here are some of the applications of the algorithm:. Base64 may only be used to encode raw result of a cryptographic function.