Python: Essential Reference

24. Internet Data Handling and Encoding

This chapter describes modules related to processing common Internet data formats and encodings such as base 64, HTML, XML, and JSON.

base64

The base64 module is used to encode and decode binary data into text using base 64, base 32, or base 16 encoding. Base 64 is commonly used to embed binary data in mail attachments and with parts of the HTTP protocol. Official details can be found in RFC-3548 and RFC-1421.

Base 64 encoding works by grouping the data to be encoded into groups of 24 bits (3 bytes). Each 24-bit group is then subdivided into four 6-bit components. Each 6-bit value is then represented by a printable ASCII character from the following alphabet:

If the number of bytes in the input stream ...