On Mon, May 2, 2022, at 7:03 AM, Chris Angelico wrote:
The "alternate alphabet" case can be done by base converting and then replacing on the string. It's not the smoothest, so that counts a bit of clunkiness; but it's also not all THAT common (I can recall doing it for SteamGuard 2FA codes, which are base 26 but avoid confusable digit/letter pairs, and that's about it).
I've mostly resorted to using str.maketrans and .replace as well.
When you say "other bases", do you mean beyond base 36? Do you have use-cases for anything >36 that isn't 64, 85, or 256? If so, how do you currently do this?
Some examples I've encountered over the past year are: Base58, as used in Bitcoin [1]. Base45 [2], and Base91. My experience is likely skewed as I do take part in CTFs where obscureness is often part of the deal.
The CPython integer type is implemented in C for performance. If that's not a consideration, maybe this would be better done in the base64 module (which is where base 85 also lives), as a general tool for arbitrary ASCIIfication.
For my usecases it hasn't been especially performance critical. The base64 module might be a good place for this to live instead of the integer type. Perhaps the base64 module is in fact a better place as converting to bytes is likely what's wanted instead of going to/from integer first.
Can you link to your codebase where you 'often' do these kinds of conversions? Is it in a performance-critical area?
I can't but it hasn't been performance critical. Regards, Simon https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-msporny-base58-01.html [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-faltstrom-base45/ [2]