What is base64 encoding used for?

Question

I\'ve heard people talking about \"base 64 encoding\" here and there. What is it used for?

Answer 1

It's basically a way of encoding arbitrary binary data in ASCII text. It takes 4 characters per 3 bytes of data, plus potentially a bit of padding at the end.

Essentially each 6 bits of the input is encoded in a 64-character alphabet. The "standard" alphabet uses A-Z, a-z, 0-9 and + and /, with = as a padding character. There are URL-safe variants.

Wikipedia is a reasonably good source of more information.