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

Some transportation protocols only allow alphanumerical characters to be transmitted. Just imagine a situation where control characters are used to trigger special actions and/or that only supports a limited bit width per character. Base64 transforms any input into an encoding that only uses alphanumeric characters, +, / and the = as a padding character.