Support for Base56

[charlesdaniels]

It could potentially be useful to have support for Base56. This could be added alongside for support for base64. If we do this, we will need to write a library for it, and we should probably do so in a separate project which can be uploaded to PyPi separately.

This will involve a compatibility level bump.

This is marked as hard because while the implementation in BitShuffle should be fairly straightforward, implementing the Base56 encoder/decoder will be really annoying.

[jyn514]

Currently looking into https://pypi.python.org/pypi/base58. Are you certain you meant to type 56? The wikipedia article links to 58.

[charlesdaniels]

From the article:

The actual order of letters in the alphabet depends on the application, which is the reason why the term “Base58” alone is not enough to fully describe the format. A variant, Base56, excludes 1 (one) and o (lowercase o) compared to Base 58.

The use case I had in mind would be for if a human ever needed to manually re-type a packet for some strange reason, hence the selection.

[jyn514]

Thoughts on RFC 1751?

[jyn514]

Started work on base56

[charlesdaniels]

Re RFC 1751: A quick glance makes it seem superficially similar to lexitar. We might want to look at using one / both?

Cool to see you starting on the base56 project. I do not have the bandwidth to contribute to that right now, but I will investigate and contribute as I am able.