4 ms·

In b64, you're going to want to pick a short set of characters that can be encoded clearly and simply, i.e. ascii chars. And the shorter the better, i.e. even i

In b64, you're going to want to pick a short set of characters that can be encoded clearly and simply, i.e. ascii chars. And the shorter the better, i.e. even in 6 bits. You take the first six bits of your binary data and convert to some ascii char mapping. And then the the next 6 bits and so on. You can't do that with unicode, and it wouldn't make sense for any other encoding standard. They are completely different things.

Moru 10y ago
Mabe srean wants a more efficient way of base64 a binary file into some text-only media like email. This depends totally on where you want to put it. If it's an email you are pretty stuck with base64, if it's a string that nothing else touches, you can use the binary data directly (eg: iso-8859) :)
- srean 10y ago
  That's indeed right. B85 is already a little more efficient than B64, but was wondering if one could abuse Unicode for this. Its a really silly, stupid situation I need this for, exchanging data with Python and I can only use Unicode strings.
  - masklinn 10y ago
    > That's indeed right. B85 is already a little more efficient than B64, but was wondering if one could abuse Unicode for this. Sure, kinda: https://github.com/pfrazee/base-emoji https://github.com/pfrazee/base-emoji (it's a base256 using emoji), but then you still need to encode that text, which is going to require 4 bytes per symbol, so I'm not sure you're going to get any actual gain over B64/B85 in the end. There's also the option of using a subset of the U+0100~U+07FF range (though it contains a diacticial block which may not be ideal) as it encodes to 2 bytes in both UTF-8 and UTF-16 (though there are diacritics in these blocks, and some of the codepoints are reserved but not allocated so…).