About Base64 Encode / Decode
Base64 turns text into a compact ASCII string using only letters, digits and a couple of symbols — a common way to carry text safely through systems that only handle plain ASCII. This encodes text to Base64 and decodes it back, correctly handling Unicode. Developers use it to read or craft the payload of a JWT, embed a small snippet in a data URI, inspect an encoded config or email header, or pass text through a channel that would otherwise mangle special characters.
How it works
Encoding first converts your text to UTF-8, then Base64-encodes those bytes, so any Unicode character survives the round trip. Decoding reverses it: it Base64-decodes to bytes and interprets them back as UTF-8 text (whitespace in the input is ignored, so line-wrapped Base64 still decodes). It uses the standard Base64 alphabet (A–Z, a–z, 0–9, +, /, with = padding). Invalid Base64 on decode is flagged rather than producing garbage.
Assumptions and behaviour
- Unicode-safe. Encoding goes through UTF-8, so emoji and non-Latin text encode and decode correctly — unlike a naive Base64 that breaks on non-ASCII.
- Uses the standard Base64 alphabet with
+and/and=padding. - On decode, whitespace is stripped first, so Base64 that's been wrapped across lines still works.
- This tool is for text, not files.
Limitations
- Base64 is encoding, not encryption. It's trivially reversible and provides no security or privacy for the data itself — never treat it as a way to hide secrets.
- It uses the standard alphabet, not URL-safe Base64 (which swaps
+//for-/_). Tokens using the URL-safe variant may not decode here without adjustment. - It handles text; it won't encode binary files, images or arbitrary downloads.
- Malformed or truncated Base64 will report an error on decode rather than guessing.
Privacy
Encoding and decoding run entirely in your browser. Your text is never uploaded or stored.
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