til/unix/generate-base64-encoding-without-newlines.md

Generate Base64 Encoding Without Newlines

There are a variety of tools that can generate a Base64 encoding of given text. Most of them that I've encountered have a number of characters at which they introduce a newline character. Here is openssl as an example:

❯ echo "here is a long bit of text to base64 encode with openssl" | openssl base64
aGVyZSBpcyBhIGxvbmcgYml0IG9mIHRleHQgdG8gYmFzZTY0IGVuY29kZSB3aXRo
IG9wZW5zc2wK

The theory I've seen is that this is to accommodate 80-character terminal screens when chunks of encoding were included in emails.

With the openssl base64 command, there is not an option to exclude the newlines, but we can pipe it through tr to remove them.

❯ echo "here is a long bit of text to base64 encode with openssl" | \
  openssl base64 | \
  tr -d '\n'
aGVyZSBpcyBhIGxvbmcgYml0IG9mIHRleHQgdG8gYmFzZTY0IGVuY29kZSB3aXRoIG9wZW5zc2wK