This is almost twice the size of the 12/7 ~= 1.71428 of the original binary representation. If we have 1 character each 7-bit long that is 1*7=7 bits and when converted to Base64 would be 2*6=12 bits since 7 bits wouldn't fit in 6 bits.

Hence, the zfill(8) to get the 8-bit number representing each character in the message.īy doing this, we have increased the overall data. This looks to be ASCIIrepresentation since it is 7-bit long. Notice that even though python 3 strings are unicode, both the output is 7 bits long without the 0b prefix. For example ord('a') would output 97 which we would convert to binary with format(97, 'b') = 1100001: message_in_binary = ''.join(format(ord(x), 'b').zfill(in_byte_size) for x in message)Ĭould use bin(), but that would yield 0b prefix to your string that represents the binary number. Take the message and convert it into binary by getting the code/int of an unicode character with ord. String.ascii_uppercase + string.ascii_lowercase + string.digits + string.digits + '+/' With Base64 we're converting any non-ASCII compliant characters or binary into a subset of the ASCII character set.Īfter refreshing up on the Base64 encoding, the first step was to create the corresponding character table: BASE64_CHARS = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789+/' Might as well write the encoder.Ĭause it's fun and the rabbit-holes. After finishing this problem, I thought it was a bit too easy and was compelled to redo it manually in python.

Does base64 encoding increase size