Hands-On Blockchain for Python Developers

Base58

The last thing we need to learn is base58. Base58 is a modified version of base64. This is usually used to encode the binary data as an ASCII string. The following code block is used to encode b'i love you' as an ASCII string:

>>> import base64>>> base64.b64encode(b'i love you')b'aSBsb3ZlIHlvdQ=='

The base64 module is part of the Python standard library.

Usually, you will not encode another ASCII string with base64. Instead, you will encode binary data, such as an image file. If you open cat.jpg with the text editor, you would get gibberish text similar to the text that's shown in the following screenshot:

This is a perfect example ...