str.find() not returning correct index.

[bowlofred]

Is there a way you could upload a sample file that shows what you're looking at? Perhaps only a few lines are necessary and could be uploaded to a pastebin.

base64 encoding and "visible in a hex editor" seem like completely different things. If you're just looking for a string that has a particular hex representation, that's not base64 encoding.

This looks like its binary data. As such identifying a particular "string" seems odd to me. How do you identify the beginning and the end of the string? By newlines or something else?