Remove trailing “=” when base64 encoding

by

The = is padding. <!————>

Wikipedia says

An additional pad character is
allocated which may be used to force
the encoded output into an integer
multiple of 4 characters (or
equivalently when the unencoded binary
text is not a multiple of 3 bytes) ;
these padding characters must then be
discarded when decoding but still
allow the calculation of the effective
length of the unencoded text, when its
input binary length would not be a
multiple of 3 bytes (the last non-pad
character is normally encoded so that
the last 6-bit block it represents
will be zero-padded on its least
significant bits, at most two pad
characters may occur at the end of the
encoded stream).

If you control the other end, you could remove it when in transport, then re-insert it (by checking the string length) before decoding.
Note that the data will not be valid Base64 in transport.

Also, Another user pointed out (relevant to PHP users):

Note that in PHP base64_decode will accept strings without padding, hence if you remove it to process it later in PHP it’s not necessary to add it back. – Mahn Oct 16 ’14 at 16:33

So if your destination is PHP, you can safely strip the padding and decode without fancy calculations.

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