Show HN: I got tired of Base64, so I made a numeric-only alternative

3 pointsposted 10 hours ago
by Forgret

Item id: 45224315

7 Comments

BinaryIgor

9 hours ago

Hmm - why would you do that? How much data, if any, can you safe by compressing it as to compared with the classic Base64?

Forgret

9 hours ago

It depends on the data. Base64 adds ~33% overhead, while NUMBASE can be encoded into one large number at once and compressed with Huffman or other algorithms. For some data types this results in fewer extra characters.

a570xyz

9 hours ago

I'm very curious as to how one gets tired of Base64?

Forgret

9 hours ago

Base64 is great and widely used. I just wanted to experiment with a numeric-only representation. NUMBASE encodes everything into a single large number, which can make certain compression schemes like Huffman more efficient and opens up new ways to store or transmit data.