3 ms·
wow how did I mess up my post so badly? I didn't even do the proper math _now_, ofc the alphabet has 26 letters and my math above only works for 26 and not 23.
by franciscop 3y ago
wow how did I mess up my post so badly? I didn't even do the proper math _now_, ofc the alphabet has 26 letters and my math above only works for 26 and not 23. I did check back when I had this thought many times. I guess I might have just had a brain fart now, I just copied what googled said while writing my post and somehow Google said 23 in a quick/bad search, so I just copied that number without checking it.
26 * 2 + 10 = 62, almost 64
(26 + 1) * 2 + 10 = 64
- wizofaus 3y agoWouldn't surprise me in the least if ChatGPT gave the alphabet written out as an example of a word with 23 letters. I wonder what the history is behind why base-64 encoding became so widespread. Sadly I can even recognise certain sequences now without having to decode them. But the fact it's not even safe for use in URLs/filenames (due to + and /) would suggest it's not really fit for purpose (and yes I know base64-url encoding exists, I once had to write code that had to deal with strings that could use either encoding, and you could only tell by looking for the presence of _ or -. Certainly that _ was not originally chosen as one the extra 2 characters needed on top of A-Za-z0-9 for full encoding is a bit baffling. "-" is often used as delimeter though - my other pick would have been #.)