DOM Exception 5 INVALID CHARACTER error on valid base64 image string in javascript
I’m trying to decode a base64 string for an image back into binary so it can be downloaded and displayed locally by an OS.
The string I have successfully renders when put as the src of an HTML IMG element with the data URI preface (data: img/png;base64, ) but when using the atob function or a goog closure function it fails.
However decoding succeeds when put in here: http://www.base64decode.org/
Any ideas?
EDIT:
I successfully got it to decode with another library other than the built-in JS function. But, it still won’t open locally – on a Mac says it’s damaged or in an unknown format and can’t get opened.
The code is just something like:
imgEl.src="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14695988/data:img/png;base64," + contentStr; //this displays successfully
decodedStr = window.atob(contentStr); //this throws the invalid char exception but i just
//used a different script to get it decode successfully but still won't display locally
the base64 string itself is too long to display here (limit is 30,000 characters)
I was just banging my head against the wall on this one for awhile.
There are a couple of possible causes to the problem. 1) Utf-8 problems. There’s a good write up + a solution for that here.
In my case, I also had to make sure all the whitespace was out of the string before passing it to atob. e.g.
function decodeFromBase64(input) {
input = input.replace(/\s/g, '');
return atob(input);
}
What was really frustrating was that the base64 parsed correctly using the base64 library in python, but not in JS.
I had to remove the data:audio/wav;base64, in front of the b64, as this was given as part of the b64.
var data = b64Data.substring(b64Data.indexOf(',')+1);
var processed = atob(data);
