RegEx to parse or validate Base64 data

Answer 1

From the RFC 4648:

Base encoding of data is used in many situations to store or transfer data in environments that, perhaps for legacy reasons, are restricted to US-ASCII data.

So it depends on the purpose of usage of the encoded data if the data should be considered as dangerous.

But if you’re just looking for a regular expression to match Base64 encoded words, you can use the following:

^(?:[A-Za-z0-9+/]{4})*(?:[A-Za-z0-9+/]{2}==|[A-Za-z0-9+/]{3}=)?$

Answer 2

Neither a ":" nor a "." will show up in valid Base64, so I think you can unambiguously throw away the http://www.stackoverflow.com line. In Perl, say, something like

my $sanitized_str = join q{}, grep {!/[^A-Za-z0-9+\/=]/} split /\n/, $str;

say decode_base64($sanitized_str);

might be what you want. It produces

This is simple ASCII Base64 for StackOverflow exmaple.