About the Base64 Encode / Decode
Encodes text to Base64 and back. Unlike the browser's built-in btoa, this handles the full Unicode range, so Hindi, emoji and accented characters survive the round trip intact.
What Base64 is for
Base64 turns any data into plain letters, digits, + and /, so it can travel through systems that only accept text: email attachments, data URLs in HTML and CSS, JSON payloads, HTTP Basic authentication headers and the middle part of a JWT. The encoded text is about a third larger than the original.
Base64 is not encryption
Anyone can decode Base64 - there is no key. Never use it to hide passwords or secrets. To check a file has not changed, use a hash instead; to create a secret, use the password generator.
Unicode and URL-safe Base64
Text is encoded as UTF-8 first, so accented letters, other scripts and emoji survive a round trip. Some systems use the URL-safe variant, which writes - and _ instead of + and /, and often drops the trailing = padding; swap those characters back before decoding if a value refuses to decode.
