Tagged Base64

If you work with digital values such as digital signatures, public keys, and transaction identifiers, Tagged Base64 can help you avoid confusion and detect corruption through three features.

• The tag is intended to give a hint about what kind of value is encoded
• The limited Base64 character set is selected to work without fuss in URLs, plain text, email, SMS, and command line arguments, etc.
• A checksum covers the tag and the value so inadvertent truncation or other corruption can very likely be detected immediately

The two forms below allow you to experiment with encoding and decoding values using Tagged Base64. The tag and value are alphanumeric separated by a tilda (~). Base64 requires two additional characters.

• 26 lowercase letters + 26 uppercase letters + 10 digits = 62 symbols

The additional characters are underscore (_) and hyphen (-).

Disclaimer: If any of this is unfamililar, it might be tempting make assumptions. TaggedBase64 is not intended for protecting secrets. There's no encryption here, just encoding. Nothing here stops a bad actor from acting badly. The checksum reduces the chances an error will go undetected; it's not a guarantee.

Here is the source code repository for this interface.

Encode Tagged Base64

Encode a Tagged Base64 by filling out the form below and pressing the Encode button.

Decode Tagged Base64

Decode a Tagged Base64 by filling out the form below and pressing the Decode button.

Here are some examples to decode

• Hi~SGVsbG8sIHlvdSEs
• CARD~QeKZpTE
• PHONE~ODY3NTMwOcQ
• zh-CN~5L2g5aW9WQ