Selfhosted

That url isn’t base64 encoded. You can tell by the fact that it’s still a URL, and doesn’t decode……

There is no such thing as a base64 encoded url. Part of an url might hold base64 encoded data, but never the url itself.

These online tools aren't working because you're using them wrong.

There's base64 -d on the command line.

I've been working on a URL cleaning tool for almost 2 years now and just committed support for that type of URL. I'll release it to crates.io shortly after Rust 1.90 on the 18th.

https://github.com/Scripter17/url-cleaner

It has 3 frontends right now: a CLI, an HTTP server and userscript to clean every URL on every webpage you visit, and a discord bot. If you want any other integration let me know and I'll see what I can do.

Also, amusingly, you decoded the base64 wrong. You forgot to change the _ to / and thus missed the /burger-dog-mold and tracking parameter garbage at the end. I made sure to remove the tracking parameters.

Edit: Published on crates.io and github under AGPL. Sadly the discord frontend couldn't be published to crates.io because to work around something (I forget exactly what) I changed a dependency from the one on crates.io to a more up-to-date version of it on github. Crates.io correctly rejects that kind of stuff. If you want to use the discord frontend, git clone the repository then run cargo build -r -p url-cleaner-discord-app.

The offer to write extra frontends stands, btw. If you want a slack bot I'll make one.

Not that you should vibe code, but you could vibe code this so easily. Have it output a static website. Give the source code a scan if you’re paranoid. Check the network tab if you’re really really paranoid. But literally you could have it output this as a static index.html file that you drop into your browser of choice.

This is the only type of coding LLMs should ever be used for imo. A small, very clearly defined task that is very easy to verify if it works. And code that won’t infect a larger project.

Edit: as others pointed out, that url isn’t base64 encoded. You would have to clearly define what you are trying to do if you want this to work. For example, do all urls follow the same format as the above?

There's something else going on there besides base64 encoding of the URL -- possibly they have some binary tracking data or other crap that only makes sense to the creator of the link.

It's not hard to write a small Python script that gets what you want out of a URL like that though. Here's one that works with your sample link:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import base64
import binascii
import itertools
import string
import sys

input_url = sys.argv[1]
parts = input_url.split("/")
  
for chunk in itertools.accumulate(reversed(parts), lambda b,a: "/".join([a,b])):
  try:
    text = base64.b64decode(chunk).decode("ascii", errors="ignore")
    clean = "".join(itertools.takewhile(lambda x: x in string.printable, text))
    print(clean)
  except binascii.Error:
    continue

Save that to a file like decode.py and then you can you run it on the command line like python3 ./decode.py 'YOUR-LINK-HERE'

e.g.

$ python3 ./decode.py 'https://link.sfchronicle.com/external/41488169.38548/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuaG90ZG9nYmlsbHMuY29tL2hhbWJ1cmdlci1tb2xkcy9idXJnZXItZG9nLW1vbGQ_c2lkPTY4MTNkMTljYzM0ZWJjZTE4NDA1ZGVjYSZzcz1QJnN0X3JpZD1udWxsJnV0bV9zb3VyY2U9bmV3c2xldHRlciZ1dG1fbWVkaXVtPWVtYWlsJnV0bV90ZXJtPWJyaWVmaW5nJnV0bV9jYW1wYWlnbj1zZmNfYml0ZWN1cmlvdXM/6813d19cc34ebce18405decaB7ef84e41'
https://www.hotdogbills.com/hamburger-molds/burger-dog-mold

This script works by spitting the URL at '/' characters and then recombining the parts (right-to-left) and checking if that chunk of text can be base64 decoded successfully. If it does, it then takes any printable ASCII characters at the start of the string and outputs it (to clean up the garbage characters at the end). If there's more than one possible valid interpretation as base64 it will print them all as it finds them.

Cyberchef!