I’ve noticed some files I opened in a text editor have all kinds of crazy unrenderable chars

  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.org
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    1 month ago

    It just converts the raw binary data into character encoding, so it doesn’t matter what the source is (image, video, database file, etc). The source binary data is taken 6 bits at a time, then this group of 6 bits is mapped to one of 64 unique characters.

    The decoding process is just the reverse of that: mapping the data back to binary form.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64