How to encode text to base64 in python

Question

I am trying to encode a text string to base64.

i tried doing this :

name = "your name" print('encoding %s in base64 yields = %s\n'%(name,name.encode('base64','strict'))) 

But this gives me the following error:

LookupError: 'base64' is not a text encoding; use codecs.encode() to handle arbitrary codecs 

How do I go about doing this ? ( using Python 3.4)

Answer 1

Remember to import base64 and that b64encode takes bytes as an argument.

import base64 base64.b64encode(bytes('your string', 'utf-8')) 

Answer 2

It turns out that this is important enough to get it's own module...

import base64 base64.b64encode(b'your name')  # b'eW91ciBuYW1l' base64.b64encode('your name'.encode('ascii'))  # b'eW91ciBuYW1l'