shell command not working in if/else statement

Question

i'm new to shell script. i wrote a test script that encode/decode plain text to base64 string. but it does not work what i thought. i want to decode base64 encoded string to plain text if ENCODING var is false.

my script:

#!/bin/bash

ENCODING=false
INPUT_STRING=dGVzdF9zdHJpbmcK

if [ $ENCODING ]; then
    echo "$INPUT_STRING" | base64
else
    echo "$INPUT_STRING" | base64 --decode
fi

output of script:

[ec2-user@ip-10-252-34-162 ~]$ ./test.sh
ZEdWemRGOXpkSEpwYm1jSwo=

the 'else' statement not working. but follow command works fine

echo "$INPUT_STRING" | base64 --decode

Answer 1

Comparing your variable as strings works. I.e:

if [ "$ENCODING" == "false" ];