I want to decode two Base64 encoded strings and combine them to make one 128 bit string. I am able to decode the Base64 encoded strings. Can some one guide me on how to combine these two decoded strings?
This is the code I used for decoding the two encoded strings.
NSData *decodedData_contentKey = [[NSData alloc] initWithBase64EncodedString:str_content options:0];
NSString *decodedString_contentKey = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:decodedData_contentKey encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
NSLog(@"%@", decodedString_contentKey);
Thanks.
Base 64 is a statically sized encoding of octets/bytes into characters/text: 6 bits of a byte are represented as a printable ASCII character. Hence the name: 2^6 = 64, it uses a alphabet of 64 characters to encode the binary data (+ plus a delimiter character: '=' that does not contain encoded bits).
UTF-8 - used in your sample code - on the other hand is a character-encoding. It is used to encode characters in octets. So character encoding works the other way around. What you are actually doing is to decode the characters back from the bytes. UTF-8 does not use 128 bit values, nor does is it statically sized; multiple bytes may be used to represent one character. It will likely fail when it comes across an octet or octets that do not combine into a valid character encoding.
There is no such thing as base 128 encoding. Please think of what you are trying to accomplish and ask a new question that we can decode, if you get stuck.
GUESSED ANSWER:
Base 64 encoding will output 64 bits (8 bytes) of ASCII text for each 6 bytes. Therefore, if you want 128 bit (16 bytes) of encoding output, you simply have to input 12 bytes. As the base 64 encoding restarts at each 4 character boundary however (4 * 8 = 32 bits of encoding, each 8 bit character represents 6 bits, 4 * 6 = 24 bits of data, 24 bits is 3 bytes -> each 4 character string holds precisely 3 bytes of input), you can simply concatenate the two base 64 strings without decoding.
