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
Did not knew that this existed, but yeah its kinda like that. Except that I only allow 5 characters.
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.