Benchmark
In base64url: Fast and URL-Safe Base64 Encoder and Decoder

do.eval = requireNamespace("microbenchmark", quietly = TRUE)

This small benchmark compares the performance of the base64 encoding/decoding in package base64url with the implementations in the packages base64enc and openssl.

Encoding of a single string

library(base64url)
library(base64enc)
library(openssl)
library(microbenchmark)

x = "plain text"
microbenchmark(
  base64url = base64_urlencode(x),
  base64enc = base64encode(charToRaw(x)),
  openssl = base64_encode(x)
)

Decoding of a single string

x = "N0JBLlRaUTp1bi5KOW4xWStNWEJoLHRQaDZ3"
microbenchmark(
  base64url = base64_urldecode(x),
  base64enc = rawToChar(base64decode(x)),
  openssl = rawToChar(base64_decode(x))
)

Encoding and decoding of character vectors

Here, the task has changed from encoding/decoding a single string to processing multiple strings stored inside a character vector. First, we create a small utility function which returns n random strings with a random number of characters (between 1 and 32) each.

rand = function(n, min = 1, max = 32) {
  chars = c(letters, LETTERS, as.character(0:9), c(".", ":", ",", "+", "-", "*", "/"))
  replicate(n, paste0(sample(chars, sample(min:max, 1), replace = TRUE), collapse = ""))
}
set.seed(1)
rand(10)

Only base64url is vectorized for string input, the alternative implementations need wrappers to process character vectors:

base64enc_encode = function(x) {
  vapply(x, function(x) base64encode(charToRaw(x)), NA_character_, USE.NAMES = FALSE)
}

openssl_encode = function(x) {
  vapply(x, function(x) base64_encode(x), NA_character_, USE.NAMES = FALSE)
}

base64enc_decode = function(x) {
  vapply(x, function(x) rawToChar(base64decode(x)), NA_character_, USE.NAMES = FALSE)
}

openssl_decode = function(x) {
  vapply(x, function(x) rawToChar(base64_decode(x)), NA_character_, USE.NAMES = FALSE)
}

The following benchmark measures the runtime to encode 1000 random strings and then decode them again:

set.seed(1)
x = rand(1000)
microbenchmark(
  base64url = base64_urldecode(base64_urlencode(x)),
  base64enc = base64enc_decode(base64enc_encode(x)),
  openssl = openssl_decode(openssl_encode(x))
)