javascript atob returning 'String contains an invalid character'

Question

I have an AJAX call getting info out of the Github API. It is returned in base64 encoding but when i try to decode it I get the aforementioned error.

Has anyone run

Answer 1

According to MDN docs, you might need to escape and then decodeURIComponent to handle unicode:

function utf8_to_b64( str ) {
    return window.btoa(unescape(encodeURIComponent( str )));
}

function b64_to_utf8( str ) {
    return decodeURIComponent(escape(window.atob( str )));
}

// Usage:
utf8_to_b64('✓ à la mode'); // "4pyTIMOgIGxhIG1vZGU="
b64_to_utf8('4pyTIMOgIGxhIG1vZGU='); // "✓ à la mode"