What is Base64?
Base64 is an encoding scheme that represents binary data using 64 safe ASCII characters. It's widely used for email attachments, embedding images as data URIs, passing API tokens, and embedding data directly in web pages.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Base64 encryption?
No. Base64 is encoding, not encryption. Anyone can decode it easily, so it should never be used to protect passwords or sensitive information.
My non-ASCII text (accented letters, Japanese, Korean, emoji, etc.) comes out garbled.
This tool encodes and decodes using UTF-8, so non-ASCII text is handled correctly. If decoding a Base64 string produced by another tool looks garbled, the original data may not have been UTF-8 to begin with.