Hexahexacontadecimal

Just as Babylonians wisely counted in sexagesimal, the wise web developer is naturally drawn to hexahexacontadecimal.

With an alphabet consisting of all unreserved URL characters:

0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz-_.~

we get a radix of 66, the densest possible way to express a number in a URL.

In hexahexacontadecimal the unsightly number 302 231 454 903 657 293 676 544 turns into the sleek i FsG UkO .0t sxw. Behold, the pinnacle of URL numeral systems.

def hexahexacontadecimal_encode_int(n):
    """Represent a number in hexahexacontadecimal."""
    alphabet = "0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz-_.~"
    if n == 0:
        return alphabet[0]
    r = StringIO()
    while n > 0:
        n, t = divmod(n, 66)
        r.write(alphabet[t])
    return r.getvalue()[::-1]

(You could have called this base66 or base 66 but why would you?)

Update: hexahexacontadecimal is now available as a Python package.

Written by Alexander Ljungberg on 2010 Jul 15 .

Tagged

• code
• compression
• optimisation

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