Base64 Encoding in Python 3

Recently I’ve been working on a backup script to back up a folder to a Backblaze B2 bucket. If only I had known I was about to spend an hour working on four silly lines of python code…

Backblaze’s documentation has absolutely no mention that this only works with Python 2. I’m not the only one¹. Pronoy had this exact issue with a Google API. Again, no mention it only works in Python 2. In fact, the moment I stumbled across Pronoy’s post is the same moment I stopped ripping my hair out.

Let’s get into the code. According to Backblaze’s API docs, they require the Account ID and Key to be base64 encoded in the following format: 'accountId:accountKey'. Seems easy enough.

Try this in a Python 2 shell:

base64.b64encode('A string')

You get an output like:

'QSBzdHJpbmc='

Try running the same thing in a Python 3 shell and you see something closer to this:

  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/python/3.6.5/Frameworks/Python.framework/ Versions/3.6/lib/python3.6/base64.py", line 58, in b64encode 
        encoded = binascii.b2a_base64(s, newline=False)
TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not 'str'

The solution? There’s a few. Pronoy’s works: which is to encode the string in UTF-8. Then, once it’s base64 encoded, you decode that as ASCII.

This works:

base64.b64encode('A string'.encode('UTF-8')).decode('ascii')

After doing some more scouring, I found this Stackoverflow thread.

# The following works, too, and looks a little neater.
base64.b64encode(bytes('A string', 'utf-8')).decode('ascii')

Here’s another Stackoverflow thread explaining why.

The original link is dead. So here’s a web archive URL. ↩

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