Did you ever saw a char and thought: "Damn, 1 byte for a single char is pretty darn inefficient"? No? Well I did. So what I decided to do instead is to pack 5 chars, convert each char to a 2 digit integer and then concat those 5 2 digit ints together into one big unsigned int and boom, I saved 5 chars using only 4 instead of 5 bytes. The reason this works is, because one unsigned int is a ten digit long number and so I can save one char using 2 digits. In theory you could save 32 different chars using this technique (the first two digits of an unsigned int are 42 and if you dont want to account for a possible 0 in the beginning you end up with 32 chars). If you would decide to use all 10 digits you could save exactly 3 chars. Why should anyone do that? Idk. Is it way to much work to be useful? Yes. Was it funny? Yes.
Anyone whos interested in the code: Heres how I did it in C: https://pastebin.com/hDeHijX6
Yes I know, the code is probably bad, but I do not care. It was just a funny useless idea I had.
Bro reinventing sixbits
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-bit_character_code
The AD&D "Gold Box" games from SSI Inc. stored game text in 6-bit encoding. The first one of these I played was "Champions of Krynn" and the PC release came on 4 360k 5.25 dsdd floppy disks. They actually needed the packing in those days, and couldn't afford to spent cpu cycles or ram on built in compression.
I remember opening up the game data files in a file viewer (maybe pc-tools?) and being confounded by the lack of text in the files.
Did not knew that this existed, but yeah its kinda like that. Except that I only allow 5 characters.
Given you are only a-z with space and dot; you could do 5bit and pack 6 characters per 32bit word with space to spare
25 bits.
Have you heard of Proquints?
https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-rayner-proquint-03.html
Funny how they have a typo in test vectors:
This is hilarious. I'm not sure how often anyone would actually need to verbalize arbitrary binary data, but I do see an advantage over base64 since the English letter names are so often phonetically similar.
The FAA/ICAO use a similar system to name aerial navigation and fixed GPS waypoints. It addresses the challenge of communicating identifiers of unique nodes in a vast network using VHF communications.
I did something like this once, in the course of a project whose purpose I don’t remember. Realising that 8-bit ASCII was wasted on the constrained alphabet of some kind of identifiers, I packed them into 6 bits, 1⅓ to a byte. I recall naming the code to do this “ShortASC”, pronounced “short-ass”