# ManifoldCF and Elasticsearch - content base64 encoded?

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/manifoldcf-and-elasticsearch-content-base64-encoded/36068>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [December 1, 2015, 3:20pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/manifoldcf-and-elasticsearch-content-base64-encoded/36068 "2015-12-01T15:20:56Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Steve\_Corey](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ba8739/32.png) [@Steve\_Corey](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Steve_Corey)\
**Post date:** [December 1, 2015, 3:20pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/manifoldcf-and-elasticsearch-content-base64-encoded/36068/1 "2015-12-01T15:20:56Z")

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I’m putting together a proof-of-concept for crawling our website content with MCF, and indexing it with ES. At a basic level, everything seems to be working. What I’m trying to understand is that when MCF indexes web content, the HTML is stored inside an object called file in a property called \_content. When this is added to the ES index, all the HTML is Base64 encoded. I believe this is preventing ES from property searching the field.

Is this Base64 encoding to be expected, or do I need to change something?

Does anyone have a walkthrough of using MCF to crawl web content, and output to ES? I’ve seen many many guides for both systems, but never something that combines the two. I’d prefer to avoid using Nutch for crawling, since it lacks any UI for management.

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**Author:** ![dadoonet](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/dadoonet/32/137187_2.png) [@dadoonet](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/dadoonet)\
**Post date:** [December 1, 2015, 3:38pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/manifoldcf-and-elasticsearch-content-base64-encoded/36068/2 "2015-12-01T15:38:20Z")

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I have no idea but it sounds like to me that they expect you have the mapper attachments plugin and defined your field as `attachment` type.

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**Author:** ![ClaudiuStack](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/claudiustack/32/15528_2.png) [@ClaudiuStack](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/ClaudiuStack)\
**Post date:** [February 15, 2017, 11:31am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/manifoldcf-and-elasticsearch-content-base64-encoded/36068/3 "2017-02-15T11:31:47Z")

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I have the same problem. Did you find any solution to fix this?

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**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [July 5, 2017, 10:03pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/manifoldcf-and-elasticsearch-content-base64-encoded/36068/4 "2017-07-05T22:03:14Z")

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