3 ms·
This makes sense only if (a) your transport medium will only transfer graphical Unicode code points, and (b) you are interested in minimizing code point count a
by colanderman 11y ago
This makes sense only if (a) your transport medium will only transfer graphical Unicode code points, and (b) you are interested in minimizing code point count as opposed to byte count.
If (a) is not true, you are better off just using binary as you state.
If (b) is not true, you are better off using Base64 if the underlying encoding is ASCII-compatible (e.g. ASCII, ISO-8859, or UTF-8), or Base4096 if the underlying encoding is UTF-16.
In the case of tweets, both (a) and (b) are true, making this somewhat worthwhile.