How to encode in base64 using Golang

Overview

Encoding can convert data into another format understandable by a recipient. In this shot, we will learn to encode a simple string of letters with a code example.

Example

package main
import (
    b64 "encoding/base64"
    "fmt"
)
func main() {
    data := []byte("abc123!?$*&()'-=@~")
    sEnc := b64.StdEncoding.EncodeToString(data)
    fmt.Println(sEnc)
   
}

Explanation

In the above example, we import the required packages for the encoding process:

import (
    b64 "encoding/base64"
    "fmt"
)

b64 is our major package for carrying out the encoding. fmt is the package we use to print to the screen. In our main function:

  1. Line 10: We assign a variable data to a string of random characters and convert the string to a byte []byte("abc123!?＄*&()'-=@~") type since that data type the encode works with.

  2. Line 12: We chain the b64 to methods(StdEncoding.EncodeToString) that encode our parsed string of random characters.

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