Hex to Base64 conversion in Python

Question

I want to convert a simple HEX string such as 10000000000002ae to Base 64.

The hex string is to be converted to bytes, and the bytes are then encoded to base64 notation,

Answer 1

from base64 import b64encode, b64decode

# hex -> base64
s = 'cafebabe'
b64 = b64encode(bytes.fromhex(s)).decode()
print('cafebabe in base64:', b64)

# base64 -> hex
s2 = b64decode(b64.encode()).hex()
print('yv66vg== in hex is:', s2)
assert s == s2

This prints:

cafebabe in base64: yv66vg==
yv66vg== in hex is: cafebabe

The relevant functions in the documentation, hex to base64:

• b64encode
• bytes.fromhex
• bytes.decode

Base64 to hex:

• b64decode
• str.encode
• bytes.hex

---

I don't understand why many of the other answers are making it so complicated. For example the most upvoted answer as of Aug 26, 2020:

• There is no need for the codecs module here.
• The codecs module uses base64.encodebytes(s) under the hood (see reference here), so it converts to multiline MIME base64, so you get a new line after every 76 bytes of output. Unless you are sending it in e-mail, it is most likely not what you want.

As for specifying 'utf-8' when encoding a string, or decoding bytes: It adds unnecessary noise. Python 3 uses utf-8 encoding for strings by default. It is not a coincidence that the writers of the standard library made the default encoding of the encode/decode methods also utf-8, so that you don't have to needlessly specify the utf-8 encoding over and over again.