Decodable is built to help developers quickly and securely decode base64 encoded strings
All encoding and decoding is done locally on your machine so no data is ever sent to a server. In fact we don't use any personal data storage severs. Decodable is built using modern tooling to ensure great reliability and high performance.
We have also added support for partial decoding as it is very common to have encoded data together with plain text, a la Kubernetes secrets. Give it a try - simply paste in partially encoded text and have a look at the output.
Decodable was designed with security as the number one priority. All encoding and decoding is completely managed on device, so nothing you enter ever leaves this site. We do not store any information you provide other than standard non-identifiable analytics data to help improve our site to better fit your needs.
We have followed modern Progressive Web App standards to ensure Decodable is fully available offline once the page has been cached initially.
Base64 is a way to encode any binary data using only A-Z, a-z and 0-9. It gets it's name from the total number of characters it uses - 64 from the 26 * 2 letters and the 10 digits. It converts all punctuation and whitespace to a more simple structure which often can prevent any issues when parsing data.
The main purpose is to make it so the data can be represented purely as text as there area number of situations in which binary data is not supported. Older email standards are one such example where binary data is not allowed. Images and files are often encoded first before sending it over the wire too, but these day it is more as a convenient standard than a hard requirement.
It is also commonly used as a way to validate hashed outputs. The hashed output can be converted to a Base64 string where it becomes much easier to display the hash, especially when you are comparing a checksum for integrity. Hashes are so often displayed in Base64 that many people incorrectly mistake Base64 itself as a hash.
Learn more about Base64 on Wikipedia.