moreplease.com/utf64

utf64

A terse, human-readable, URL-safe encoding for JSONish strings.

Overview

Use this when you need to encode a string to make it URL-safe, but you also want to keep it as small and readable as possible (unlike base64). For example:

Input string	base64	utf64
Hello	SGVsbG8=	YHello
"Hello!"	IkhlbGxvISI=	AYHelloGA
{"Hello":"world"}	eyJIZWxsbyI6IndvcmxkIn0=	MAYHelloAFAworldAN

I made this because I wanted to build a web API with a nice JSON schema that could also be cached by a CDN. To make it cacheable, I had to use the GET method; but GET can't (portably) have a request body, so this means all the API parameters need to be packed into the URL. utf64 is a fire-and-forget way to solve this problem.

Installation & usage

JavaScript

npm install utf64

import { str_to_utf64, utf64_to_str } from "utf64";

# Encode
console.log(str_to_utf64("Hello!"));

# Decode
console.log(utf64_to_str("YHelloG"));

Python

pip install utf64

from utf64 import str_to_utf64, utf64_to_str

# Encode
print(str_to_utf64("Hello!"))

# Decode
print(utf64_to_str("YHelloG"))

Go

go get utf64.moreplease.com

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"utf64.moreplease.com"
)

func main() {
	fmt.Println(utf64.Encode("Hello!"))
	result, err := utf64.Decode("YHelloG")
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	fmt.Println(result)
}

Command-line tool

The JS package includes a utf64 command-line tool:

npm install -g utf64

# Encode
echo -n "Hello\!" | utf64

# Decode
echo -n "YHelloG" | utf64 -d

Specification

Output is encoded using base64url-compatible characters: _ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789-

utf64	Decoded as
_	As-is
a to z	As-is
0 to 9	As-is
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTU	Mapped to: "',.;:!?()[]{}#=+-*/\
V	Newline
W	Space
X	Prefix for Unicode 0-63. For example, "Xk" is "%" (U+0025)
Y	Prefix for Unicode 64-127. For example, "Y_" is "@" (U+0040)
Z	Prefix for Unicode 128+. The following characters are interpreted as UTF-8, reduced to 6-bit bytes by stripping the redundant top two bits. For example, "ZhBr" is "€" (UTF-8 [11]100010 [10]000010 [10]101100)

See test.json for tests that (hopefully) cover all the edge cases, for both valid and invalid encodings.