What is Base64 encoding?
Base64 is a way to represent data using only 64 safe, printable characters: the letters A to Z and a to z, the digits 0 to 9, plus the symbols + and /, with = used as padding at the end. It takes the bytes of your text and regroups them into 6-bit chunks, each mapped to one of those characters. The result is longer than the original, roughly a third bigger, but it contains nothing that could be misread by systems that only expect plain text.
It is important to be clear about what Base64 is not. It is not encryption and it does not hide anything. Anyone can reverse it instantly, so never use it to protect passwords or private data.
Why you might need to encode text as Base64
Base64 turns up whenever binary or special-character data has to travel through a channel built for plain text. Common examples are embedding data in JSON or XML, building a Basic authentication header value, storing a small payload in a configuration file, or placing a value in a URL or email body without worrying about line breaks and unusual characters.
Developers also meet it when debugging: an API response or token field full of letters that look like noise is often Base64. Encoding a known sample string is a quick way to check you are producing the format another system expects. To go the other direction, use the Base64 decoder.
How to encode text with this tool
- Type or paste your text into the "Plain text" box. It starts with the sample "Hello, world!".
- Read the "Base64 output" box underneath. It updates as you type, so there is no encode button.
- Click Copy to copy the encoded string to your clipboard.
The conversion runs in your browser, and your text is not sent anywhere. This page encodes only. If you paste a Base64 string and want the original text back, switch to the decoder page.
Unicode, padding, and other things to watch
Text is converted to UTF-8 bytes before encoding, so accented letters, non-Latin scripts, and emoji are handled correctly rather than causing an error. That means the output matches what most modern tools and programming languages produce when they encode UTF-8 text. A system that expects a different character encoding, such as Latin-1, will produce a different Base64 string for non-ASCII characters.
The output uses the standard Base64 alphabet, with + and / and trailing = padding. Some formats, such as the parts of a JWT, use a URL-safe variant that swaps those characters, so a value copied from here may need small adjustments for those cases. The tool also encodes text only, not files. If you need to turn an image into Base64, the Image to Base64 tool is built for that.