Reading .pem files for secured

[KnightMare]

> The reason is that if I understand the logic of Base64, it's 
> that each character stores 6 bits. My private key .pem has 49 
> lines of 64 characters worth of Base64, though the sat line 
> isn't full. Anyway, this is data worth of over 18000 bits. The 
> RSA key is supposed to be 4096 bits, so this can't be correct.
>
> What am I missing?

PEM is a X.509 certificate (whose structure is defined using 
ASN.1), encoded using the ASN.1 DER (distinguished encoding 
rules), then run through Base64 encoding and stuck between 
plain-text anchor lines (BEGIN CERTIFICATE and END CERTIFICATE).