Base64 Encoding Explained: What It Is and When to Use It
The problem Base64 solves Many systems only transport text. Email was designed for 7-bit ASCII, JSON is defined as text, and HTML attributes hold strings. But the things we actually want to move around — images, PDFs, encryption keys, binary protocol buffers — are bytes that can easily include control characters, quotes, or newlines. If you paste raw binary into a text channel, something will eventually eat a byte: a line ending gets rewritten, a quote terminates a string early, a proxy strips a NUL. Base64 gives you a safe envelope by re-encoding those bytes using only 64 characters that every text system agrees on: ...