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But as a software developer, it’s always fun to think about edge cases, and squeezing almost 5KB into a 280-“character” tweet is fun This makes me wonder if a

But as a software developer, it’s always fun to think about edge cases, and squeezing almost 5KB into a 280-“character” tweet is fun This makes me wonder if anyone has created a version of base64 that uses the vast, sprawling space of unicode to take advantage of these glyph-count-based restrictions. If they have, I hope they called it uuuniencode.

alisonatwork 5y ago
There are several of these. base65536 is the one that seems to pop up the most often on HN, although base2048 is more useful for Twitter. On the GitHub page the dev helpfully links to the various implementations: https://github.com/qntm/base2048 https://github.com/qntm/base2048
ludocode 5y ago
This is what you're looking for: https://github.com/qntm/base2048 https://github.com/qntm/base2048 It can store 385 bytes per tweet. This link includes a bit more technical explanation of how Twitter counts characters towards the limit. Apparently, using the entire range of unicode characters does not improve compression because of the double weighting of emojis and other characters as described in TFA. It links to a base131072 encoding which can only store 297 bytes per tweet.