I don't disagree with the idea that a relatively complicated base64 API seems painful but... > Normally I agree with explicit being better than implicit, but I

I don't disagree with the idea that a relatively complicated base64 API seems painful but... > Normally I agree with explicit being better than implicit, but I don't see the harm here. If there's no specific interoperability requirements, explicitly choosing a configuration isn't particularly important. Pretty much the entire point of base64 is interop, so there would always be specific interop requirements. And since a base64 library tends to be reflexive, a library's default tends to either "way too strict to consume any base64 you can find in the wild" or "so loose you can get a carrier strike group through" e.g. Ruby and Python will strip out any invalid character from the input before attempting a parse, python requires padding to be present but I'm not sure there's any way to make ruby's decode64 fail as long as you give it a string since it does not.