Current Perl documentation can be found at perldoc.perl.org.

Here is our local, out-dated (pre-5.6) version:

The MIME-tools package (available from CPAN) handles this and a lot more. Decoding BASE64 becomes as simple as:

    use MIME::base64;
    $decoded = decode_base64($encoded);

A more direct approach is to use the unpack() function's ``u'' format after minor transliterations:

    tr#A-Za-z0-9+/##cd;                   # remove non-base64 chars
    tr#A-Za-z0-9+/# -_#;                  # convert to uuencoded format
    $len = pack("c", 32 + 0.75*length);   # compute length byte
    print unpack("u", $len . $_);         # uudecode and print