For Facebook fbml Apps Facebook is sending in a signed_request parameter explained here: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/canvas They have given the php version of decoding this signed request: http://pastie.org/1054154 How to do the same in python? I tried base64 module but I am getting Incorrect padding error: >>> base64.urlsafe_b64decode("eyJhbGdvcml0aG0iOiJITUFDLVNIQTI1NiIsImV4cGlyZXMiOjEyNzk3NDYwMDAsIm9hdXRoX3Rva2VuIjoiMjk1NjY2Njk1MDY0fDIuRXpwem5IRVhZWkJVZmhGQ2l4ZzYzUV9fLjM2MDAuMTI3OTc0NjAwMC0xMDAwMDA0ODMyNzI5MjN8LXJ6U1pnRVBJTktaYnJnX1VNUUNhRzlNdEY4LiIsInVzZXJfaWQiOiIxMDAwMDA0ODMyNzI5MjMifQ") Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/base64.py", line 112, in urlsafe_b64decode return b64decode(s, '-_') File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/base64.py", line 76, in b64decode raise TypeError(msg) TypeError: Incorrect padding Continue reading...