Never dealt with Base64 before, but this is what I found from reading the PHP manual.
If your project requires you to encode your data in Base64 before sending it somewhere, then that's what base64_encode() does.base64_encode() returns data encoded with base64. This encoding is designed to make binary data survive transport through transport layers that are not 8-bit clean, such as mail bodies.
If you need more info on Base64, read the Wikipedia entry.
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