Base64 to Text Decoder Online - Free, Instant

Paste a Base64 string in the left box and the plain text appears on the right as you type. No button to press.

It cleans up messy strings for you: a data URI prefix, line breaks, URL-safe characters and missing padding are all handled, and it tells you what it fixed. Everything runs in your browser.

How to Decode Base64 to Text

1. Paste your string into the left box.
2. Read the result on the right.
3. Hit Copy or Download if you need it saved.

Messy Strings Are Handled For You

Base64 rarely arrives clean. Most tools reject anything that is not perfect, which sends you off to fix it by hand. This one fixes four things and says so.

1. Data URI prefix - data:text/plain;base64, at the front is removed.
2. Line breaks - MIME wraps at 76 characters, so pasted email content is full of them.
3. URL-safe alphabet - - and _ are swapped back to + and /. This is what JWT tokens use.
4. Missing padding - the trailing = signs get added back.

One thing it cannot fix is a truncated string. If the length leaves a remainder of 1 when divided by 4, characters are missing and no decoder can guess them.

When Base64 to Text Gives You Nonsense

If you get symbols instead of words, the string is almost certainly a file rather than text. A PDF or an image decodes to raw bytes, and bytes are not letters.

The page checks the first characters and tells you which file type it found, then points you at Base64 to PDF or Base64 to image.

Nothing You Paste Is Sent Anywhere

Most decoders post your string to a server and send the result back. This page does not. The decoding happens in your own browser as you type.

That matters more here than anywhere else on the site. Base64 strings routinely carry API tokens, session cookies, basic auth credentials and internal payloads. None of that should land in someone else's request log.

Reading a JWT Without a Key

A JWT is three Base64url chunks split by dots. The first two are the header and the payload, and neither is encrypted.

Paste either chunk here and you can read it. That is not a flaw in JWT - the signature protects against tampering, not against reading. It is also the clearest proof that Base64 is not encryption.

Encoding Text the Other Way

Need a string rather than the text? Text to Base64 encodes as you type and handles emoji and every alphabet through UTF-8.

Not sure whether your string is even valid? The Base64 validator checks the length, padding and character set, and repairs what it can.