Go by Example: Base64 Encoding

Go provides built-in support for base64 encoding/decoding.
	package main
This syntax imports the `encoding/base64` package with the `b64` name instead of the default `base64`. It’ll save us some space below.	import b64 "encoding/base64" import "fmt"
	func main() {
Here’s the `string` we’ll encode/decode.	data := "abc123!?$*&()'-=@~"
Go supports both standard and URL-compatible base64. Here’s how to encode using the standard encoder. The encoder requires a `[]byte` so we cast our `string` to that type.	sEnc := b64.StdEncoding.EncodeToString([]byte(data)) fmt.Println(sEnc)
Decoding may return an error, which you can check if you don’t already know the input to be well-formed.	sDec, _ := b64.StdEncoding.DecodeString(sEnc) fmt.Println(string(sDec)) fmt.Println()
This encodes/decodes using a URL-compatible base64 format.	uEnc := b64.URLEncoding.EncodeToString([]byte(data)) fmt.Println(uEnc) uDec, _ := b64.URLEncoding.DecodeString(uEnc) fmt.Println(string(uDec)) }

The string encodes to slightly different values with the standard and URL base64 encoders (trailing `+` vs `-`) but they both decode to the original string as desired.	$ go run base64-encoding.go YWJjMTIzIT8kKiYoKSctPUB+ abc123!?$*&()'-=@~
	YWJjMTIzIT8kKiYoKSctPUB- abc123!?$*&()'-=@~

Previous example: SHA1 Hashes.

Next example: Reading Files.