Base64 encoding

In this article I take a quick look at the Base64 binary-to-text encoding system, and see how to encode and decode in Python.

Typical applications

Base64 is common where you need to send binary data over systems designed primarily to handle text. An example of this is an email system. Here, binary attachments have to be encoded as text for transmission. Any attached files such as images will be Base64 encoded, and sent as text.

Summary

In this article I took a very quick look at Base64 encoding, and saw how you can encode and decode Base64 using Python.