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.
It’s all fun and games until the requirement changes and you need to support uppercase letters and digits as well.
I am constantly on how I can allow Uppercase, without significantly reducing the posiible amounts of chars
If you're ever doing optimizations like this, always think in binary. You're causing yourself more trouble by thinking in decimal. With n bits you can represent 2^n different results. Using this you can figure out how many bits you need to store however many different potential characters. 26 letters can be stored in 5 bits, with 6 extra possibilities. 52 letters can be stored in 6 bits, with 12 extra possibilities. Assuming you want an end of string character, you have 11 more options.
If you want optimal packing, you could pack this into 48 bits, or 6 bytes/chars, for 8 characters.
Well it’s certainly possible to fit both uppercase and lowercase + 11 additional characters inside an int (26 + 26 + 11 = 63). The you need a null terminating char, which adds up to 64, which is 6 bits.
So all you need is 6 bits per char. 6 * 5 = 30, which is less than 32.
It’s easier to do this by thinking in binary rather than decimals. Look into bit shifting and other bitwise operations.
Depending on the use-case you might also want to add special case value like @Redkey@programming.dev did in their example, and get kind of UTF-8 pages. Then you can pack lowercase to 5 bits, and uppercase and some special symbols to 10 bits, and it will be smaller if uppercase are rare