4tm4j33tk4ur / base100

base💯 - Encode your data into emoji

Base💯

Encode things into Emoji.

Base💯 can represent any byte with a unique emoji symbol, therefore it can represent binary data with zero printable overhead (see caveats for more info).

Usage

$ echo "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" | base100
👫👟👜🐗👨👬👠👚👢🐗👙👩👦👮👥🐗👝👦👯🐗👡👬👤👧👜👛🐗👦👭👜👩🐗👫👟👜🐗👣👘👱👰🐗👛👦👞🐁

Base💯 will read from stdin unless a file is specified, will write UTF-8 to stdout, and has a similar API to GNU's base64. Data is encoded by default, unless --decode is specified; the --encode flag does nothing and exists solely to accommodate lazy people who don't want to read the docs (like me).

USAGE:
    base100 [FLAGS] [input]

FLAGS:
    -d, --decode     Tells base💯 to decode this data
    -e, --encode     Tells base💯 to encode this data
    -F, --fast       Go twice as fast, but crash on imperfect input (decode only)
    -h, --help       Prints help information
    -V, --version    Prints version information

ARGS:
    <input>    The input file to use

Caveats

Base💯 is very space inefficient. It bloats the size of your data by around 3x, and should only be used if you have to display encoded binary data in as few printable characters as possible. It is, however, very suitable for human interaction. Encoded hashes and checksums become very easy to verify at a glance, and take up much less space on a terminal.

Performance

$ base100 --version
base💯 0.2.0

$ base64 --version
base64 (GNU coreutils) 8.28

$ cat /dev/urandom | base100 | pv > /dev/null
 [ 502MiB/s]

$ cat /dev/urandom | base64 | pv > /dev/null
 [ 232MiB/s]

$ cat /dev/urandom | base100 | base100 -dF | pv > /dev/null
 [ 223MiB/s]

$ cat /dev/urandom | base64 | base64 -d | pv > /dev/null
 [ 176MiB/s]

In both scenarios, base💯 compares favorably to GNU base64. It should be noted that base💯 in fast-mode sacrifices all sanity checks and makes zero guarantees about gracefully handling malformed input. base💯 also bloats the size of the output more than base64, making these readings somewhat exaggerated.

Future plans

• Allow data to be encoded with the full 1024-element emoji set
• Add further optimizations and ensure we're abusing SIMD as much as possible
• Make fast mode less fragile while maintaining fastness