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README.md

BaseXX/base58

Pretty good Base58 encoder with customizable encoding alphabet.

Purpose

There are many methods to encode/decode binary data into printable format. The most common onces are Hexadecimal (Base16) and Base64.

While those are good approaches in some situations, each of them has own limitations: Hexadecimal doubles the memory footprint and Base64 is hard to understand/read. They still have a place to be used when storage and readability are not of concern.

Base58 encoding serves double purpose:

  1. Long data presented in short format (compression of sorts)
  2. Human readable by removing ambiguous characters

To meet this requirements, Base58 avoids punctuation (+ and /) and ambiguous digits and letters such as 0 (zero), O (capital) and o (lower-case).

Alphanumeric  0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Base64        0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz+/=
Base58         123456789ABCDEFGH JKLMN PQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijk mnopqrstuvwxyz
Hexadecimal   0123456789ABCDEF

Available alphabets

This BaseXX/base58 package provides two encoding alphabets:

  1. the one used to represent Bitcoin addresses (the default one)

  2. the one used by Flickr (different lower/upper case order)

    BTC 123456789ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijkmnopqrstuvwxyz Flickr 123456789abcdefghijkmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZ

Comparison with other BaseN

Characters often used by common BaseXX encodings:

Hexa    0123456789ABCDEF
Base58   123456789ABCDEFGH JKLMN PQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijk mnopqrstuvwxyz
Base62  0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Base64  0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz+/=
Base91  0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz+/=*-_~.,?!@#$%&()[]{|}<>^:`'
Base92  0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz+/=*-_~.,?!@#$%&()[]{|}<>^:`'"

Can be much faster

Performance can be much much improved. Using the tips of https://github.com/mtraver/base91 (original work from Joachim Henke), this BaseXX/base92 may become 200 times faster on the encoding, and 30 times faster on the decoding.

Contributions welcome

This Base92 needs your help to become faster. Please propose your enhancements, or even a further refactoring. Any contribution is welcome. ;-)