On Mon, May 02, 2022 at 09:58:35AM +0200, Marc-Andre Lemburg wrote:
Just a word of warning: numeric bases are not necessarily the same as numeric encodings. The latter usually come with other formatting criteria in addition to representing numeric values, e.g. base64 is an encoding and not the same as representing numbers in base 64.
Correct. base64 is for encoding byte-strings, not numbers:
binascii.hexlify(b"Hello world") b'48656c6c6f20776f726c64'
Of course we can treat any byte string as a base-256 number, in which case "Hello world" has the value 87521618088882671231069284. There's no obvious collation/alphabet to use for base 64, but if we use (say) ASCII digits + uppercase + lowercase + "!@" then that "Hello world" number 875...284 above is: 4XbR6nl87TlScna (in base 64) which is completely different from the base64 encoding. By the way, in base 64 that "Hello world" number has: * digital sum of 445; * digital root of 4, with persistance of 3; * digital product of 261040984907288205312; * zero-free digital product root of 48, with persistance of 7. There is absolutely no significance to any of this. I'm just geeking out :-) -- Steve