How to decode base64 to single bytes?

Question

In the following code:

import base64
base64.decodebytes('DBCCOAABAMA='.encode('ascii'))

the result is

b'\x0c\x10\x828\x00\x01\x00\xc0'

The third byte is \\x828 which does not fit into a single byte and lead into a problem for my script. I do not want to decode it as anything else than ASCII .

Is there anything wrong with the initial base64 encoder? Why does this problem happen and how can I fix it?

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Update:

The problem I face is the code

base64.decodebytes('DBCCOAABAMA='.encode('ascii')).decode('ascii')

leads to an error

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x82 in position 2: ordinal not in range(128)

Answer 1

Some bytes, if they fall in the printable character range, don't get printed as hex escapes. This little bit of code shows you what's really happening:

>>> for b in base64.decodebytes('DBCCOAABAMA='.encode('ascii')):
    print(hex(b), chr(b))

0xc 
0x10 
0x82 ‚
0x38 8
0x0 
0x1 
0x0 
0xc0 À

PS I don't understand why encode didn't throw an error, some of those bytes are outside of the ASCII range.