That is a minor nuisance when dealing with raw bytes. Any sane language representation would probably store it as a separate field egen not on the wire. I woul

That is a minor nuisance when dealing with raw bytes. Any sane language representation would probably store it as a separate field egen not on the wire. I would probably do BOM, LUT, BYTES. Where LUT is a lookup table of indices for every 64 chars so that you could do o(1) random access for the vast majority of cases.