Python’s Base64 module provides functions to encode binary data to Base64 encoded format and decode such encodings back to binary data.
It implements Base64 encoding and decoding as specified in RFC 3548.
It supports Python 2. B64encode (hash. Base64 encoding works directly on the underlying binary representation of data. It also has some developer-oriented documentation for Mozilla products, such as Firefox Developer Tools. We have an image tag with the source equalling the actual file name.
This article contains examples that demonstrate how to perform Base64 encoding in Python.
You can use the b64encode()
function provided by the base64
module to perform Base64 encoding. It accepts a bytes-like object and returns the Base64 encoded bytes -
The default b64encode()
functions uses the standard Base64 alphabet that contains characters A-Z
, a-z
, 0-9
, +
, and /
. Since +
and /
characters are not URL and filename safe, The RFC 3548 defines another variant of Base64 encoding whose output is URL and Filename safe. This variant replaces +
with minus (-
) and /
with underscore (_
)
Also Read: Python Base64 Decode Examplehttps://downtfil380.weebly.com/craps-for-dummies.html.
These are solutions to the Cryptopals Crypto Challenges, solved using C# and .NET Core.These articles talk through the theory and code snippets that I found most valuable towards solving the challenges.
A friendly reminder as always: do not use this code in production.
Hegis grasp: evil resurrected 2 0 3. See my introductory post for more solutions, complete source code, and my favorite resources.
We’ve all used Convert.ToBase64String()
but what is it actually happening under the covers?Sure, it’s taking a value and representing it using only characters from a range of 64 characters, but how exactly does it do that?Up until now, I probably couldn’t have told you.
My favorite example for understanding how Base64 encoding works is actually from Wikipedia:
Source | Text (ASCII) | M | a | n | |||||||||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Octets | 77 (0x4d) | 97 (0x61) | 110 (0x6e) | ||||||||||||||||||||||
Bits | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | |
Base64 encoded | Sextets | 19 | 22 | 5 | 46 | ||||||||||||||||||||
Character | T | W | F | u | |||||||||||||||||||||
Octets | 84 (0x54) | 87 (0x57) | 70 (0x46) | 117 (0x75) |
To Base64 encode, we take our original string, convert it into bytes (octets), take 6 bits at a time (sextets), and then look up that sextet’s corresponding value in our Base64 lookup table.
In the challenge, we’re given a hex string to Base64 encode.Hexadecimal is the Base16 (0–9, a–f) representation of a byte.For example, the byte 77 would be 4d.In C languages, you’ll often see this prefixed with 0x
, making it 0x4d.
We typically don’t work directly with hex strings, and I’ve yet to find simple handling for hex string in C#, so the first thing I did was to take the hex string and turn it into bytes:
Here we have our hex string, take two characters at a time, and then convert them to a byte using Convert.ToByte()
with a fromBase
of 16 (which is the base for hexadecimals (0–f)).
Now that we have the bytes, we need to get their octets, and then break those octets into sextets.
The simplest way I could find was to parse the byte array into a string representation of the binary.I’m sure there’s a more efficient way to do this, but I found this the clearest way for me to see what was going on.
Now that we have the octets, let’s get them sextets by taking 6 bits at a time and then convert them back into integers (to simplify the next step):
Now that we have our sextets, we can look up their corresponding base 64 value.So, the value 42 turns into q, and 4 is E.
And if you chain the above together, you should end up with the hex string 4d616e
being encoded as: TWFu
.
So, what happens when the original text length is not neatly divisible by 3?Well, we need to deal with padding.
Going back to that really useful Wikipedia example, we can see that if the final block is not 3 in length, then we need to pad both the final sextet and the encoded value itself.
Download android player for pc. So, the final sextet gets padded with 0s on the right, and any missing sextets become the padding character '='
.
We can update our OctetsToSextets
with a check such as:
And then, after creating our Base64 value in SextetsToBase64String
, check to see if it’s missing any characters, padding with '='
as appropriate.
So, testing our code, if we enter the hex string 4d61
, then we should end up with TWE=
.
There’s a much nicer implementation by David Zych which goes into more detail.I recommend checking it out.
We’ve only dealt with encoding here, however, you'll need to handle decoding later in the challenges.You can either use Convert.FromBase64String()
or implement the reverse of the above yourself.
These articles discuss the theory and code snippets that helped me the most.For full challenge solutions, check out the accompanying GitHub repository.