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 email 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.