MIME::Base64 is a software tool for encoding and decoding base64 strings. This software provides an effective and efficient way to encrypt and decrypt data by converting it into a human-readable format.
MIME::Base64 is an incredibly useful Perl module that enables encoding and decoding of base64 strings. It provides a wide range of functions to encode and decode strings, with the base64 encoding outlined in RFC 2045 - MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions).
This encoding is specifically designed to represent octets in a format that isn't necessarily human-readable, using a 65-character subset of US-ASCII to enable six bits to be represented per printable character.
MIME::Base64 provides several functions, such as encode_base64($str) and encode_base64($str, $eol), to encode data. The first argument is the string being encoded, while the second specifies the line-ending sequence to be used. If unspecified, it defaults to "n". The returned encoded string is broken into lines of no more than 76 characters, and ends with $eol unless it is empty.
Similarly, decoding is also available using decode_base64($str). This function takes a single argument, the string to decode, and returns the decoded data. Any character not part of the 65-character base64 subset is silently ignored, and characters that appear after a '=' padding character are never decoded.
If the length of the string to decode, after ignoring non-base64 characters, is not a multiple of 4 or if padding occurs too early, a warning is generated under -w. If you would rather not import these routines into your namespace, they can be called via MIME::Base64::encode/decode.
Overall, MIME::Base64 is a highly recommended tool for anyone working with base64 encoding/decoding in their Perl code. Its features are highly comprehensive, and the encoding/decoding process is highly efficient. The only requirement is a working Perl installation.
Version 3.08: N/A