Base85 Encoder and Decoder

Base85 is a family of binary-to-text encodings that represents four input bytes as five printable characters. Because five radix-85 digits can cover every possible 32-bit value, Base85 has about 25% size overhead for full four-byte blocks, making it denser than Base64's four output characters for every three bytes.

Use this tool to turn text into a Base85 value for examples, fixtures, compact notes, or text-only systems. You can also paste Base85 text to decode it back into UTF-8 text. Whitespace in encoded input is ignored during decoding.

Base85 is useful when binary or non-ASCII data needs to be copied through text-oriented systems, included in examples, or inspected with fewer characters than hexadecimal or Base64. It is an encoding only: it does not compress, encrypt, authenticate, or make sensitive content safe to publish.

Different Base85 variants use different alphabets and framing rules. Adobe Ascii85 and plain Ascii85 use the printable range from ! through u. The Adobe option supports the z shortcut for an all-zero four-byte block and accepts optional <~ and ~> wrappers when decoding, but encoded output is emitted without wrappers.

Encoded output can include punctuation that has special meaning in HTML, XML, JSON, shells, and programming languages. Quote, escape, or wrap values appropriately before embedding them in source code, markup, command lines, or configuration files.