Is it ok to remove the equal signs from a base64 string?

Question

I have a string that I\'m encoding into base64 to conserve space. Is it a big deal if I remove the equal sign at the end? Would this significantly decrease entropy? What can I d

Answer 1

Other than in the case @Martin Ellis points out, messing with the padding characters can lead to getting a

TypeError: Incorrect padding

and And producing some garbage while you're at it.

As stated by @MattH, base64 will do the opposite of conserving space.

Instead to conserve space, you should apply compression algorithms such as zlib.

For example, zlib

import zlib

s = '''large string....'''
compressed = zlib.compress(s)

compression_ratio = len(s)*1.0/len(compressed)    

# And later...
out = zlib.decompress(compressed) 

# The above function is also good for relieving stress.