Passing base64 encoded strings in URL

There are additional base64 specs. (See the table here for specifics ). But essentially you need 65 chars to encode: 26 lowercase + 26 uppercase + 10 digits = 62.

You need two more ['+', '/'] and a padding char '='. But none of them are url friendly, so just use different chars for them and you're set. The standard ones from the chart above are ['-', '_'], but you could use other chars as long as you decoded them the same, and didn't need to share with others.

I'd recommend just writing your own helpers. Like these from the comments on the php manual page for base64_encode:

function base64_url_encode($input) { return strtr(base64_encode($input), '+/=', '._-');}function base64_url_decode($input) { return base64_decode(strtr($input, '._-', '+/='));}

No, you would need to url-encode it, since base64 strings can contain the "+", "=" and "/" characters which could alter the meaning of your data - look like a sub-folder.

Valid base64 characters are below.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789+/=

@joeshmo Or instead of writing a helper function, you could just urlencode the base64 encoded string. This would do the exact same thing as your helper function, but without the need of two extra functions.

$str = 'Some String';$encoded = urlencode( base64_encode( $str ) );$decoded = base64_decode( urldecode( $encoded ) );