Data URLs

Data URLs, URLs prefixed with the data: scheme, allow content creators to embed small files inline in documents.

Syntax

Data URLs are composed of four parts: a prefix (data:), a MIME type indicating the type of data, an optional base64 token if non-textual, and the data itself:

data:[<mediatype>][;base64],<data>

The mediatype is a MIME type string, such as 'image/jpeg' for a JPEG image file. If omitted, defaults to text/plain;charset=US-ASCII

If the data is textual, you can simply embed the text (using the appropriate entities or escapes based on the enclosing document's type). Otherwise, you can specify base64 to embed base64-encoded binary data.

A few examples:

data:,Hello%2C%20World!

Simple text/plain data

data:text/plain;base64,SGVsbG8sIFdvcmxkIQ%3D%3D

base64-encoded version of the above

data:text/html,%3Ch1%3EHello%2C%20World!%3C%2Fh1%3E

An HTML document with <h1>Hello, World!</h1>

data:text/html,<script>alert('hi');</script>

An HTML document that executes a JavaScript alert. Note that the closing script tag is required.

Encoding data into base64 format

Base64 is a group of binary-to-text encoding schemes that represent binary data in an ASCII string format by translating it into a radix-64 representation. By consisting only in ASCII characters, base64 strings are generally url-safe, and that's why they can be used to encode data in Data URLs.

Encoding in Javascript

The Web APIs have native methods to encode or decode to base64: Base64 encoding and decoding.

Encoding on a Unix system

Base64 encoding of a file or string on Linux and Mac OS X systems can be achieved using the command-line base64 (or, as an alternative, the uuencode utility with -m argument).

echo -n hello|base64
# outputs to console: aGVsbG8=

echo -n hello>a.txt
base64 a.txt
# outputs to console: aGVsbG8=

base64 a.txt>b.txt
# outputs to file b.txt: aGVsbG8=

Encoding on Microsoft Windows

Encoding on Windows can be done through powershell or some dedicated tool. It can even be done via bash base64 utility (see section Encoding on a Unix system) if WSL is activated.

[convert]::ToBase64String([Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetBytes("hello"))
# outputs to console: aGVsbG8=

bash -c "echo -n hello`|base64"
# outputs to console: aGVsbG8=
# the backtick (`) is used to escape the piping (|) character here

Common problems

This section describes problems that commonly occur when creating and using data URLs.

data:text/html,lots of text...<p><a name%3D"bottom">bottom</a>?arg=val

This represents an HTML resource whose contents are:

lots of text...<p><a name="bottom">bottom</a>?arg=val

Syntax

The format for data URLs is very simple, but it's easy to forget to put a comma before the "data" segment, or to incorrectly encode the data into base64 format.

Formatting in HTML

A data URL provides a file within a file, which can potentially be very wide relative to the width of the enclosing document. As a URL, the data should be formatable with whitespace (linefeed, tab, or spaces), but there are practical issues that arise when using base64 encoding.

Length limitations

Although Firefox supports data URLs of essentially unlimited length, browsers are not required to support any particular maximum length of data. For example, the Opera 11 browser limited URLs to 65535 characters long which limits data URLs to 65529 characters (65529 characters being the length of the encoded data, not the source, if you use the plain data:, without specifying a MIME type).

Lack of error handling

Invalid parameters in media, or typos when specifying 'base64', are ignored, but no error is provided.

No support for query strings, etc.

The data portion of a data URL is opaque, so an attempt to use a query string (page-specific parameters, with the syntax <url>?parameter-data) with a data URL will just include the query string in the data the URL represents.

Security issues

A number of security issues (e.g. phishing) have been associated with data URLs, and navigating to them in the browser's top level. To mitigate such issues, top-level navigation to data:// URIs has been blocked in Firefox 59+ (release version, Nightly/Beta from 58), and we hope to see other browsers follow suit soon. See Blocking Top-Level Navigations to data URLs for Firefox 58 for more details.

Specifications

Browser compatibility

See also

• Base64 encoding and decoding
• atob()
• btoa()
• CSS url()
• URI