You can use btoa() and atob() to convert to and from base64 encoding.
There appears to be some confusion in the comments regarding what these functions accept/return, so…
btoa()accepts a “string” where each character represents an 8-bit byte – if you pass a string containing characters that can’t be represented in 8 bits, it will probably break. This isn’t a problem if you’re actually treating the string as a byte array, but if you’re trying to do something else then you’ll have to encode it first.atob()returns a “string” where each character represents an 8-bit byte – that is, its value will be between0and0xff. This does not mean it’s ASCII – presumably if you’re using this function at all, you expect to be working with binary data and not text.
See also:
- How do I load binary image data using Javascript and XMLHttpRequest?
Most comments here are outdated. You can probably use both btoa() and atob(), unless you support really outdated browsers.
Check here:
- https://caniuse.com/?search=atob
- https://caniuse.com/?search=btoa
In 2025, all "evergreen" browsers offer toBase64 and fromBase64 to convert a Uint8Array to and from Base64 string. If your input is a Unicode string, not raw bytes, you can convert it to and from Uint8Array (of UTF-8 bytes) by TextEncoder and TextDecoder. See also another answer about this.
From here:
/**
*
* Base64 encode / decode
* http://www.webtoolkit.info/
*
**/
var Base64 = {
// private property
_keyStr : "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789+/=",
// public method for encoding
encode : function (input) {
var output = "";
var chr1, chr2, chr3, enc1, enc2, enc3, enc4;
var i = 0;
input = Base64._utf8_encode(input);
while (i < input.length) {
chr1 = input.charCodeAt(i++);
chr2 = input.charCodeAt(i++);
chr3 = input.charCodeAt(i++);
enc1 = chr1 >> 2;
enc2 = ((chr1 & 3) << 4) | (chr2 >> 4);
enc3 = ((chr2 & 15) << 2) | (chr3 >> 6);
enc4 = chr3 & 63;
if (isNaN(chr2)) {
enc3 = enc4 = 64;
} else if (isNaN(chr3)) {
enc4 = 64;
}
output = output +
this._keyStr.charAt(enc1) + this._keyStr.charAt(enc2) +
this._keyStr.charAt(enc3) + this._keyStr.charAt(enc4);
}
return output;
},
// public method for decoding
decode : function (input) {
var output = "";
var chr1, chr2, chr3;
var enc1, enc2, enc3, enc4;
var i = 0;
input = input.replace(/[^A-Za-z0-9\+\/\=]/g, "");
while (i < input.length) {
enc1 = this._keyStr.indexOf(input.charAt(i++));
enc2 = this._keyStr.indexOf(input.charAt(i++));
enc3 = this._keyStr.indexOf(input.charAt(i++));
enc4 = this._keyStr.indexOf(input.charAt(i++));
chr1 = (enc1 << 2) | (enc2 >> 4);
chr2 = ((enc2 & 15) << 4) | (enc3 >> 2);
chr3 = ((enc3 & 3) << 6) | enc4;
output = output + String.fromCharCode(chr1);
if (enc3 != 64) {
output = output + String.fromCharCode(chr2);
}
if (enc4 != 64) {
output = output + String.fromCharCode(chr3);
}
}
output = Base64._utf8_decode(output);
return output;
},
// private method for UTF-8 encoding
_utf8_encode : function (string) {
string = string.replace(/\r\n/g,"\n");
var utftext = "";
for (var n = 0; n < string.length; n++) {
var c = string.charCodeAt(n);
if (c < 128) {
utftext += String.fromCharCode(c);
}
else if((c > 127) && (c < 2048)) {
utftext += String.fromCharCode((c >> 6) | 192);
utftext += String.fromCharCode((c & 63) | 128);
}
else {
utftext += String.fromCharCode((c >> 12) | 224);
utftext += String.fromCharCode(((c >> 6) & 63) | 128);
utftext += String.fromCharCode((c & 63) | 128);
}
}
return utftext;
},
// private method for UTF-8 decoding
_utf8_decode : function (utftext) {
var string = "";
var i = 0;
var c = c1 = c2 = 0;
while ( i < utftext.length ) {
c = utftext.charCodeAt(i);
if (c < 128) {
string += String.fromCharCode(c);
i++;
}
else if((c > 191) && (c < 224)) {
c2 = utftext.charCodeAt(i+1);
string += String.fromCharCode(((c & 31) << 6) | (c2 & 63));
i += 2;
}
else {
c2 = utftext.charCodeAt(i+1);
c3 = utftext.charCodeAt(i+2);
string += String.fromCharCode(((c & 15) << 12) | ((c2 & 63) << 6) | (c3 & 63));
i += 3;
}
}
return string;
}
}
Also, search for "JavaScript base64 encoding" turns up a lot of other options, and the above was the first one.