Base64 is a way of encoding binary data (such as images or documents) into text that can be easily transmitted over channels that only support text, such as email or web pages. It works by dividing the binary data into chunks of 6 bits and mapping each chunk to one of 64 characters, such as A-Z, a-z, 0-9, + and /. Sometimes, the encoded text needs to be padded with one or two = signs at the end to make it a multiple of four characters.
For example, the word "Man" in ASCII is 01001101 01100001 01101110 in binary. This can be divided into four chunks of 6 bits: 010011, 010110, 000101 and 101110. These chunks correspond to the Base64 characters T, W, F and u respectively. So the Base64 encoding of "Man" is "TWFu".
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