Converting a string to and from Base 64 [duplicate]

Question

I am trying to write two programs one that converts a string to base64 and then another that takes a base64 encoded string and converts it back to a string.
so far i cant get past the base64 encoding part as i keep getting the error

TypeError: expected bytes, not str

my code looks like this so far

def convertToBase64(stringToBeEncoded):
import base64
EncodedString= base64.b64encode(stringToBeEncoded)
return(EncodedString)

Answer 1

A string is already 'decoded', thus the str class has no 'decode' function.Thus:

AttributeError: type object 'str' has no attribute 'decode'

If you want to decode a byte array and turn it into a string call:

the_thing.decode(encoding)

If you want to encode a string (turn it into a byte array) call:

the_string.encode(encoding)

In terms of the base 64 stuff: Using 'base64' as the value for encoding above yields the error:

LookupError: unknown encoding: base64

Open a console and type in the following:

import base64
help(base64)

You will see that base64 has two very handy functions, namely b64decode and b64encode. b64 decode returns a byte array and b64encode requires a bytes array.

To convert a string into it's base64 representation you first need to convert it to bytes. I like utf-8 but use whatever encoding you need...

import base64
def stringToBase64(s):
    return base64.b64encode(s.encode('utf-8'))

def base64ToString(b):
    return base64.b64decode(b).decode('utf-8')