Mastering Windows PowerShell Scripting - Third Edition

Working with Base64

Base64 is a transport encoding that is used to represent binary data, and therefore, any (relatively simple) data type.

Base64 is particularly useful when storing complex strings in files, or in text-based transport protocols, such as SMTP.

The .NET System.Convert class contains the following static methods that can be used to work with Base64:

• ToBase64String
• FromBase64String

The ToBase64String method takes an array of bytes and converts it into a string. For example, a simple byte array may be converted as follows:

PS> [Byte[]]$bytes = 97, 98, 99, 100, 101PS> [Convert]::ToBase64String($bytes)YWJjZGU=

A more meaningful byte sequence can be made from a few words by getting the byte values for each character:

PS> $bytes ...