What is the real purpose of Base64 encoding?

Question

Why do we have Base64 encoding? I am a beginner and I really don't understand why would you obfuscate the bytes into something else (unless it is encryption). In one of the books I read Base64 encoding is useful when binary transmission is not possible. Eg. When we post a form it is encoded. But why do we convert bytes into letters? Couldn't we just convert bytes into string format with a space in between? For example, 00000001 00000004? Or simply 0000000100000004 without any space because bytes always come in pair of 8?

Answer 1

Base64 is a way to encode binary data into an ASCII character set known to pretty much every computer system, in order to transmit the data without loss or modification of the contents itself. For example, mail systems cannot deal with binary data because they expect ASCII (textual) data. So if you want to transfer an image or another file, it will get corrupted because of the way it deals with the data.

Note: base64 encoding is NOT a way of encrypting, nor a way of compacting data. In fact a base64 encoded piece of data is 1.333… times bigger than the original datapiece. It is only a way to be sure that no data is lost or modified during the transfer.