Finally, enter ctrl+d to signal the end of input.Īnimated gif showing how to base64 decode a string in the Mac terminal.Now paste or type your Base64 encoded string after the command and hit enter again.MacOS comes with a handy base64 command line utility that can encode and decode Base64 strings right in Terminal. In this article, we’ll explore some easy ways to decode Base64 strings using built-in Mac commands and online tools. Whether it’s an API response, file attachment, or secret key, being able to quickly decode Base64 is a handy skill for any Mac user. However, you’ll often find yourself needing to decode Base64 encoded data on your Mac. Base64 encoding converts binary data into a text format that can be safely sent between systems. The Base64 decoding starts from chunking this binary stream into groupings of eight characters:Ġ1001000 01100001 01110010 01110010 01111001 00100000 01010000 01101111 01110100 01110100 01100101 01110010Įach of these groupings translates into the numbers: 72, 97, 114, 114, 121, 32, 80, 111, 116, 116, 101, 114.įinally, these decimal values can be converted back into the original characters using to the ASCII character table: H, a, r, r, y,, P, o, t, t, e, r.How to base64 decode a string in the Mac terminalĮncoding data into Base64 format is a very common process used to securely transmit information over networks and the internet. The Base64-encoded value of 'Harry Potter' is SGFycnkgUG90dGVy. The disadvantage is that the message encodeed using the Base64 algorithm increases its length - every 3 bytes of data are encoded to 4 ASCII characters (a ~33% increase). These 3 bytes are then converted into 4 'printable' ASCII characters from the table above. A byte consists of 8 bits, so Base64 takes 24 bits in total. The Base64 encoding takes the original binary data and devides it into chunks of 3 bytes. The Base64 encoding scheme is described in RFC 3548. The Base64 decoding is the process of decoding the Base64-encoded string of the ASCII characters back to the original binary or the textual format. The Base64 alphabet consists of the ASCII alphanumeric character set and a couple of symbols. It is commonly used when there is a need to store or transmit the binary data over systems that are designed to deal with ASCII, e.g. Thanks to it, you can convert Chinese characters, emoji and even images and PDF documents into a 'readable' string, which can be saved or transferred anywhere. It allows to encode arbitrary bytes to bytes which are known to be safe to send without getting corrupted. The Base64 encoding is the process of encoding the binary data into a 'readable' string. All the features of this web application are accessible free of charge. We do not store or inspect the contents of the entered data or uploaded files in any way. Both your browser and our servers encrypt all traffic before sending any data. The data encoded to Base64 doesn't contain information about the character set, so if the decoded text is not readable, you may try to select another character set.Īll communications with Base64-Decode.Online are secured with SSL protocol (HTTPS). If the original textual data was encoded to Base64 using another character set, you can change it using this option. By default, Base64-Decode.Online uses the UTF-8 character set. Finally it converts the decoded binary data back to the textual format using the string_code() method and displays the result in the text area above.Īdvanced options Character set The textual data decoded from Base64 should be converted from the binary format ('bytes' object) to the human-readable textual format ('str' object) by calling the string_code() method. Then it decodes this binary data from the Base64 format using the base64.standard_b64decode(). The decoder converts the Base64-encoded string into the binary using the Python's base64_string.encode() method.

Base64-Decode.Online is written on Python and by default uses the UTF-8 character set.

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