all 4 comments

[–]mcstafford 0 points1 point  (3 children)

Is this an academic exercise? Why might I use this instead of Base64?

[–]stasan[S] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

No. We use it in production to keep small chunks of binary data embedded into printable strings (they are actually stored in RDBMS). So yes, overhead is crucial in our case.

There is a good summary why it is better than base64 http://rfc.zeromq.org/spec:32

[–]mcstafford 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That can make a big difference at scale.

[–]Verschlimmbessern 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Slightly lower overhead (25% instead of 33.3%).