de64

20051227 10:00 by javier

Base64 is used to encode binary data in printable ASCII form. de64 is a trivial perl script to decode such strings:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use MIME::Base64;
local $/ = undef;
print decode_base64(shift||<STDIN>);

(Download)
One application of de64 is decoding UTF8 LDAP attributes inside LDIF files. For instance, “cn:: Um9iZXJ0byBNYXJ0w61uZXo=” may be decoded with

$ de64 Um9iZXJ0byBNYXJ0w61uZXo=
Roberto Martínez

(Look Randal! I’m using a CPAN module this time! ;-) ) Of course, all the heavy lifting is done by MIME::Base64 from CPAN.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 27th, 2005 at 10:00 and is filed under Code, General, Perl. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.