How to encode a Map as Base64 string?

Question

i like to encode a java map of strings as a single base 64 encoded string. The encoded string will be transmitted to a remote endpoint and maybe manipulated by a not nice pe

Answer 1

Your solution works. The only other approach would be to serialize the map yourself (iterate over the keys and values). That would mean you'd have to make sure you handle all the cases correctly (for example, if you transmit the values as key=value, you must find a way to allow = in the key/value and you must separate the pairs somehow which means you must also allow this separation character in the name, etc).

All in all, it's hard to get right, easy to get wrong and would take a whole lot more code and headache. Plus don't forget that you'd have to write a lot of error handling code in the parser (receiver side).