whitespace character from base64 decode
 

Hello All,

I'm getting an unexpected white space character when I run the following command:
echo "FglqZmpvLjo="|openssl base64 -d

However, running that string back though base64 does not return the same value.
If I run this:echo "FglqZmpvLjo="|openssl base64 -d > temp.txt
and open in vim, I see
Can anyone explain this issue?

Thanks!

What output you want? Do you want ("} symbol to be printed?

The question is why is it outputting that whitespace? its not a space, its not a tab... I don't know what "^V " is. The true reason is this is only part of a script. Each character is then inputed into a for loop. obviously, the for loop doesn't like the whitespace as I've coded it, but I can't work around the problem without knowing what character it is outputting.

According to Wikipedia, ^V is a Synchronous idle. I'm not understanding.

That is what is encoded by the input "FglqZmpvLjo=". It's really a non-printable byte, not whitespace. That's why if you just look at the output in the terminal it seems like the ^V byte is not there.

That name refers to old systems that used this byte in a certain way; you should simply consider it a byte with value 22.

Actually, you can code your script such that it can handle any input (except for 0 (aka NUL) bytes) by quoting properly.