Step 1

• Create a new Python file in PyCharm by right-clicking the project you created and selecting New > Python File.

Step 2

• Import the Base64 module.

import base64

Step 3

• Ask the user to provide a secret, and assign it to a variable.

secret = input("Please enter a secret: ") 

Step 4

• Encode the secret using b64encode() and then convert the Byte data type returned by b64encode() to UTF-8 encoding. Save the output to a new variable.
• Note: The aim is to encode the base64 secret, but the secret will also need to be encoded to UTF-8 format to obtain a readable message required by the base64 module.

encoded = base64.b64encode(secret.encode("utf-8"))

Step 5

• Decode the secret using b64decode(), and save the output to a new variable.

decoded = base64.b64decode(encoded)

Step 6

• Print the encoded secret.
• Note that the output is “gibberish” (unreadable), which is what we want.

print("The encoded string is ", encoded)

Step 7

• Print the decoded secret.
• Note: The output will show a b’{input_string}’. Suppose the string you entered was ‘p@wn3d’ in Step 2. You would then see an output of b’p@wn3d’. The string inside the single quotes after the “b” is the decoded string.

print("The decoded string is ", decoded)

Final Code

import base64

secret = input("Please enter a secret: ")
encoded = base64.b64encode(secret.encode("utf-8"))
decoded = base64.b64decode(encoded)
print("The encoded string is ", encoded)
print("The decoded string is ", decoded)