From time to time in your programming career, 0:01 you'll need to deal with binary encoding. 0:03 One of the many ways to encode binary data to text is using 0:07 the base 64 encoding scheme. 0:12 A binary encoding scheme will represent binary data in a text format. 0:15 We mainly use this when sending binary data across a medium which 0:21 expects text data, like when requesting websites across a network. 0:26 There are several encoding formats available for this, and 0:32 programmatically, many function the same way. 0:35 We're going to take a look now at Base64. 0:39 Let's load up a work space and get to it. 0:42 So, the next thing we'll take a look at is the Base64 module. 0:46 Now, sometimes we'll be in the situation where we need to encode and 0:50 decode binary data. 0:54 This is a little bit more common when we're working with web based programs. 0:56 It's a great method of sending data back and forth and 1:00 making sure it stays in the same place. 1:03 Now we get a couple of different methods, decode and encode 64, 1:06 with a couple of different variants, first strict and URL safe. 1:11 Now, let's go ahead and just see how this works. 1:16 So I'm gonna load up a work space, and I've loaded up IRB. 1:19 Now we have to acquire Base64, 1:23 and we'll say our message is Welcome to Treehouse. 1:26 Now if we wanted to encode this message, we could say Base64.encode64 and 1:33 then pass in our message as the argument. 1:39 And we get back this encoded string. 1:43 Now the same way, that we encode it. 1:46 We've got this encoded string now. 1:55 We could decode it as well by using the decode64 method. 1:58 And we get back our original string. 2:05 Now the other variance that are in use are strict decode and strict encoding. 2:08 No line feeds are added. 2:14 Now we saw that at the end of the sting that was encoded. 2:16 If we go back here, we can see we've got new lines added here. 2:20 And there's also a variant that does URL safe encoding and decoding. 2:24 Which changes the dash instead of plus and then underscore instead of slash. 2:30 This makes it a lot more useful if you are posting webpage data. 2:36 But those are the two methods that we use. 2:42 So let's see Base64.encode64(message). 2:44 And now we can also do urlsafe_encode64. 2:51 And we get a very slightly different string, just without that \n. 2:59 And the decode64 would work the same way as well. 3:05