How to check whether a string is Base64 encoded or not

I want to decode a Base64 encoded string, then store it in my database. If the input is not Base64 encoded, I need to throw an error.

How can I check if a string is Base64 encoded?

Solution 1:

You can use the following regular expression to check if a string constitutes a valid base64 encoding:

^([A-Za-z0-9+/]{4})*([A-Za-z0-9+/]{3}=|[A-Za-z0-9+/]{2}==)?$

In base64 encoding, the character set is [A-Z, a-z, 0-9, and + /]. If the rest length is less than 4, the string is padded with '=' characters.

^([A-Za-z0-9+/]{4})* means the string starts with 0 or more base64 groups.

([A-Za-z0-9+/]{4}|[A-Za-z0-9+/]{3}=|[A-Za-z0-9+/]{2}==)$ means the string ends in one of three forms: [A-Za-z0-9+/]{4}, [A-Za-z0-9+/]{3}= or [A-Za-z0-9+/]{2}==.

Solution 2:

If you are using Java, you can actually use commons-codec library

import org.apache.commons.codec.binary.Base64;

String stringToBeChecked = "...";
boolean isBase64 = Base64.isArrayByteBase64(stringToBeChecked.getBytes());

[UPDATE 1] Deprecation Notice Use instead

Base64.isBase64(value);

   /**
     * Tests a given byte array to see if it contains only valid characters within the Base64 alphabet. Currently the
     * method treats whitespace as valid.
     *
     * @param arrayOctet
     *            byte array to test
     * @return {@code true} if all bytes are valid characters in the Base64 alphabet or if the byte array is empty;
     *         {@code false}, otherwise
     * @deprecated 1.5 Use {@link #isBase64(byte[])}, will be removed in 2.0.
     */
    @Deprecated
    public static boolean isArrayByteBase64(final byte[] arrayOctet) {
        return isBase64(arrayOctet);
    }

Solution 3:

Well you can:

• Check that the length is a multiple of 4 characters
• Check that every character is in the set A-Z, a-z, 0-9, +, / except for padding at the end which is 0, 1 or 2 '=' characters

If you're expecting that it will be base64, then you can probably just use whatever library is available on your platform to try to decode it to a byte array, throwing an exception if it's not valid base 64. That depends on your platform, of course.

Solution 4:

As of Java 8, you can simply use java.util.Base64 to try and decode the string:

String someString = "...";
Base64.Decoder decoder = Base64.getDecoder();

try {
    decoder.decode(someString);
} catch(IllegalArgumentException iae) {
    // That string wasn't valid.
}