Does python have an equivalent to Javascript's 'btoa'

Question

I'm trying to find an exact equivalent to javascript's function 'btoa', as I want to encode a password as base64. It appears that there are many options however, as listed here:

https://docs.python.org/3.4/library/base64.html

Is there an exact equivalent to 'btoa' in python?

score 25 · Accepted Answer · edited Sep 29 '21 at 16:49

25

Python's Base64:

import base64

encoded = base64.b64encode(b'Hello World!')
print(encoded)

# value of encoded is SGVsbG8gV29ybGQh

Javascript's btoa:

var str = "Hello World!";
var enc = window.btoa(str);

var res = enc;

// value of res is SGVsbG8gV29ybGQh

As you can see they both produce the same result.

edited Sep 29 '21 at 16:49

blong

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answered Sep 04 '16 at 04:34

Harrison

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While this works, it might be preferable to write it like [Shlomi Lachmish has](https://stackoverflow.com/a/56921526/320399) (explicitly encoding the text). Quoting another SO answer: "_To send text reliably you can first encode to bytes using a text encoding of your choice (for example UTF-8) and then afterwards Base64 encode the resulting binary data into a text string that is safe to send encoded as ASCII._" - https://stackoverflow.com/a/3538079/320399 . Also, see: https://stackoverflow.com/q/3470546 – blong Sep 29 '21 at 16:51

score 13 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 07 '19 at 10:55

13

I tried the python code and got (with python3) TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not 'str'

When I added the encode it seems to work

import base64

dataString = 'Hello World!'
dataBytes = dataString.encode("utf-8")
encoded = base64.b64encode(dataBytes)

print(encoded)  # res=> b'SGVsbG8gV29ybGQh'

answered Jul 07 '19 at 10:55

Shlomi Lachmish

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`encoded = base64.b64encode(b'Hello World!')` would also work – user3556757 Jul 15 '21 at 14:40

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 07 '22 at 04:47

if you are in django, usually a bit tricky with types.

import json
import base64


data = [{"a": 1, "b": 2}]

btoa = lambda x:base64.b64decode(x)
atob = lambda x:base64.b64encode(bytes(x, 'utf-8')).decode('utf-8')

encoded = atob(json.dumps(data))
print(encoded)
# W3siYSI6IDEsICJiIjogMn1d
print(type(encoded))
# <class 'str'>

decoded = json.loads(btoa(encoded))
print(decoded)
# [{'a': 1, 'b': 2}]
print(type(decoded))
# <class 'list'>

Does python have an equivalent to Javascript's 'btoa'

3 Answers3