Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@bkenny
Created August 21, 2013 12:58
Show Gist options
  • Save bkenny/6294133 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Save bkenny/6294133 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Quickly encode a file in ruby to base64
require 'base64'
# Open the file you wish to encode
data = File.open('/Users/bkenny/Desktop/d3cce16ee41411e296c022000a1f980f_101.mp4').read
# Encode the puppy
encoded = Base64.encode64(data)
# Spit it out into one continous string
puts encoded.gsub(/\n/,"")
@mcansky
Copy link

mcansky commented Mar 3, 2020

thanks

@calmerwaters
Copy link

You could just use the following, to save the last step:

require 'base64'

# Open the file you wish to encode
data = File.open('/Users/bkenny/Desktop/d3cce16ee41411e296c022000a1f980f_101.mp4').read

# Encode the puppy
encoded = Base64.strict_encode64(data)

See reference for strict_encode64 https://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.4.1/libdoc/base64/rdoc/Base64.html#method-i-strict_encode64

Note: this means no new lines are added ;)

@sampenguin
Copy link

sampenguin commented Jun 28, 2024

For anyone else that comes across that was struggling like me, I've found I have to use .binread instead of .read to correctly encode an uploaded image file (or more specifically, the tempfile that rails creates in that situation), otherwise the base64 encoding data comes out woefully short and you'll get invalid results trying to decode or send to an external API (such as Google Cloud Vision).

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment