alt Hacker News> However, when decoding, we must handle errors and skip spaces.
This had me scratching my head. Why would a base64 decoder need to skip spaces? But indeed, MDN documents this behavior:
> Note that: The whitespace in the space is ignored.
JS never ceases to surprise. Also, check out that typo :D
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
Replies
layer8 • today at 1:23 AM
This might be for compatibility with XML Schema base64Binary, which collapses all whitespace (such as line breaks) to single spaces.
cluckindan • 11/29/2025
So technically it’s now possible to hide a payload in somewhat human-readable text, as long as it base64-decodes.
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Probably so you can put in line breaks? Seems common in base64 data, such as armored PGP keys or emails attachments. HTML attributes allow line breaks, although I haven’t seen it done for base64 images.