Base 64 is an industry
encoding method whose encoded characters are determined by using a
positional scheme that uses only ASCII characters. Several Base 64
encoding schemes have been defined by the industry for specific uses,
such as e-mail or content masking. SAS maps positions 0–61
to the characters A–Z, a–z, and 0–9. Position
62 maps to the character +, and position 63 maps to the character
/.
The following are some
uses of Base 64 encoding:
-
embed binary data in an XML file
-
-
The '=' character in
the encoded results indicates that the results have been padded with
zero bits. In order for the encoded characters to be decoded, the
'=' must be included in the value to be decoded.