1. Introduction: The Problem of Incompatible Languages Imagine you want to send a photograph to a friend via email. The email system was designed decades ago to handle only text—letters, numbers, and punctuation. It was never built for images. But we send images through email every day. How? The answer is encoding. The image (which is really just binary data—a series of 0s and 1s) is translated into a language that email can understand: text characters. At the other end, your friend's email client translates it back into the image. Base64 is one of the most common translation languages. It works like this: It takes binary data (any file: image, video, document) and converts it into a string of letters, numbers, and a few special characters. This text version can be safely sent through any system that handles text, even if the system was never designed for binary files. A Base64 Encoder is a tool that automates this translation. Instead of doing the math yourself, you paste your dat...