base85

base85

Simple utility to manage base85. Where base64 adds approximately 1/3, base85 only adds about 1/4. Of course there's a tradeoff. The Base85 alphabet includes characters that might not be as friendly as the base64 alphabet. While it's still only printable characters, the Ascii85 specification contains quotes (' and ") which needs escaping in many programming languages, and the ZeroMQ specification contains < and > which need escaping in most (all?) SGML languages.

Supported encoding specifications

• Ascii85
• ZeroMQ

Installation

npm install base85

Usage

For encoding:

var base85 = require('base85');
console.log(base85.encode('Hello, world!')); // 'nm=QNz.92Pz/PV8aP'
console.log(base85.encode('Hello, world!', 'ascii85')); // ' <~87cURD_*#TDfTZ)+T~>'

For decoding:

var base85 = require('base85');
var decoded = base85.decode('vqG:5Cw?IqayPd#az#9uAbn%daz>L5wPF#evpK6}vix96y?$k6z*q');
console.log(decoded.toString('utf8')); // 'all work and no play makes jack a dull boy'

Bugs

Doesn't support the z-abbreviation for Ascii85. This means that data encoded with this support will cause the library to return false. An all-zero input buffer will be encoded as <~!!!!!~>, rather than <~z~>

Doesn't support IPv6 encoding specification (RFC1924) for now. This baby requires requires 128-bit arithmetic, which is rather problematic. I'm thrilled to see that the author of the RFC took this in consideration, specifically - quote from the RFC: "This is not considered a serious drawback in the representation, but a flaw of the processor designs." Silly processor designers.

API

encode(data[, encoding])

Encodes the specified data. If encoding is ascii85, the encoded data will be prepended with <~ and appended with ~>.

data The data to encode, may be a String or a Buffer.

encoding Which specification to use when encoding data. May be either ascii85 (Adobe) or z85 (ZeroMQ). Default is z85.

returns A String with the encoded data.

decode(data[, encoding])

Decodes the specified data. If encoding is ascii85, the data is expected to start with <~ and and end with ~>. No checks are actually made for this, but output will be unexpected if this is not the case.

A buffer is always returned as data may not be representable in a string. If you know it is, you can easily convert it to a string using the Buffer.toString() utility.

data The data to decode. May be a String or a Buffer. Expected to be enclosed in <~ and ~>.

encoding Which specification data is encoded with. May be either ascii85 (Adobe) or z85 (ZeroMQ). Default is z85.

returns A Buffer With the decoded data, or boolean false if the buffer could not be decoded. When testing if the result succeeded, always use operators with 3 characters ('===' or '!==').