[python] How to encode text to base64 in python

I am trying to encode a text string to base64.

i tried doing this :

name = "your name"
print('encoding %s in base64 yields = %s\n'%(name,name.encode('base64','strict')))

But this gives me the following error:

LookupError: 'base64' is not a text encoding; use codecs.encode() to handle arbitrary codecs

How do I go about doing this ? ( using Python 3.4)

For py3, base64 encode and decode string:

import base64

def b64e(s):
    return base64.b64encode(s.encode()).decode()


def b64d(s):
    return base64.b64decode(s).decode()

It turns out that this is important enough to get it's own module...

import base64
base64.b64encode(b'your name')  # b'eW91ciBuYW1l'
base64.b64encode('your name'.encode('ascii'))  # b'eW91ciBuYW1l'

Use the below code:

import base64

#Taking input through the terminal.
welcomeInput= raw_input("Enter 1 to convert String to Base64, 2 to convert Base64 to String: ") 

if(int(welcomeInput)==1 or int(welcomeInput)==2):
    #Code to Convert String to Base 64.
    if int(welcomeInput)==1:
        inputString= raw_input("Enter the String to be converted to Base64:") 
        base64Value = base64.b64encode(inputString.encode())
        print "Base64 Value = " + base64Value
    #Code to Convert Base 64 to String.
    elif int(welcomeInput)==2:
        inputString= raw_input("Enter the Base64 value to be converted to String:") 
        stringValue = base64.b64decode(inputString).decode('utf-8')
        print "Base64 Value = " + stringValue

else:
    print "Please enter a valid value."

It looks it's essential to call decode() function to make use of actual string data even after calling base64.b64decode over base64 encoded string. Because never forget it always return bytes literals.

import base64
conv_bytes = bytes('your string', 'utf-8')
print(conv_bytes)                                 # b'your string'
encoded_str = base64.b64encode(conv_bytes)
print(encoded_str)                                # b'eW91ciBzdHJpbmc='
print(base64.b64decode(encoded_str))              # b'your string'
print(base64.b64decode(encoded_str).decode())     # your string

To compatibility with both py2 and py3

import six
import base64

def b64encode(source):
    if six.PY3:
        source = source.encode('utf-8')
    content = base64.b64encode(source).decode('utf-8')

Whilst you can of course use the base64 module, you can also to use the codecs module (referred to in your error message) for binary encodings (meaning non-standard & non-text encodings).

For example:

import codecs
my_bytes = b"Hello World!"
codecs.encode(my_bytes, "base64")
codecs.encode(my_bytes, "hex")
codecs.encode(my_bytes, "zip")
codecs.encode(my_bytes, "bz2")

This can come in useful for large data as you can chain them to get compressed and json-serializable values:

my_large_bytes = my_bytes * 10000
codecs.decode(
    codecs.encode(
        codecs.encode(
            my_large_bytes,
            "zip"
        ),
        "base64"),
    "utf8"
)

Refs:

• https://docs.python.org/3/library/codecs.html#binary-transforms
• https://docs.python.org/3/library/codecs.html#standard-encodings
• https://docs.python.org/3/library/codecs.html#text-encodings

1) This works without imports in Python 2:

>>>
>>> 'Some text'.encode('base64')
'U29tZSB0ZXh0\n'
>>>
>>> 'U29tZSB0ZXh0\n'.decode('base64')
'Some text'
>>>
>>> 'U29tZSB0ZXh0'.decode('base64')
'Some text'
>>>

(although this doesn't work in Python3 )

2) In Python 3 you'd have to import base64 and do base64.b64decode('...') - will work in Python 2 too.