Question 1

What is Base32 used for?

Accepted Answer

Base32 encodes binary data into a 32-character alphabet (commonly A–Z plus 2–7). It is used in TOTP / Google Authenticator secret keys, AWS access key IDs, Keri, IPFS CIDs and any system that needs case-insensitive, human-transcribable encoding without symbols.

Question 2

What is Crockford Base32?

Accepted Answer

Crockford Base32 omits the letters I, L, O and U so it cannot be confused with the digits 1 or 0. It is widely used wherever humans transcribe codes by hand — for example backups, key fingerprints and short identifiers — because mistakes are easy to spot.

Question 3

Is my input sent to a server?

Accepted Answer

No. All encoding and decoding happens locally in your browser using JavaScript. Nothing is uploaded or stored.

Question 4

Why is the output sometimes padded with equals signs?

Accepted Answer

RFC 4648 Base32 pads the output with the '=' character so the encoded length is always a multiple of 8. Crockford and z-base-32 do not use padding. You can strip '=' when interoperating with systems that omit it.

Question 5

Can I decode Base32 hex keys?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Switch input mode to Hex and the tool will treat your text as a hexadecimal byte sequence before Base32-encoding it. Switching to Decode mode works the same way in reverse.

Alphabet	Symbols	Used by
RFC 4648	A–Z, 2–7 (=)	TOTP secrets, IPFS CIDs, Keri
RFC 4648 base32hex	0–9, A–V (=)	XML / XSD encodings, GEPIR
Crockford	0–9, A–Z (no I, L, O, U)	Backups, key fingerprints
z-base-32	Custom lowercase set	Human-readable tokens, Tahoe-LAFS