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 is neither useless nor funny. It's optimization for storage capacity. If everyone in the world put in that level of effort into compression, computer storage and processing would actually be faster than the previous generation.
Unless you only copy and compare you have to decode it, or implement more complicated logic for everything from searching to concatenation (which is normally just memcopy).