I am now using python base64 module to decode a base64 coded XML file, what I did was to find each of the data (there are thousands of them as for exmaple in "ABC....", the "ABC..." was the base64 encoded data) and add it to a string, lets say s, then I use base64.b64decode(s) to get the result, I am not sure of the result of the decoding, was it a string, or bytes? In addition, how should convert such decoded data from the so-called "network byte order" to a "host byte order"? Thanks!
Each base64 encoded string should be decoded separately - you can't concatenate encoded strings (and get a correct decoding).
The result of the decode is a string, of byte-buffer - in Python, they're equivalent.
Regarding the network/host order - sequences of bytes, have no such 'order' (or endianity) - it only matters when interpreting these bytes as words / ints of larger width (i.e. more than 8 bits).
Python base64 data decode and byte order convert