Base64 of String without casting

[Rene Zwanenburg via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Wednesday, 1 June 2016 at 09:31:51 UTC, tcak wrote:
> I understand that Base64 uses Ranges, and since String is seen 
> and used as unicode by Ranges (please tell me if I am wrong).
>
> I am guessing, for this reason, auto btoa = 
> std.base64.Base64.encode("Blah"); doesn't work. You need to be 
> casting the string to ubyte[] to make it work which doesn't 
> look and feel nice at all.
>
> Can/shall we add another alias into the module for encode 
> method, so it accepts a string, and casts it to ubyte[] by 
> itself?

This should do the trick:

https://dlang.org/phobos/std_string.html#.representation