BASE32

Base32, a derivation of Base64, is a notation for expressing large numbers in a form that can be conveniently and accurately transmitted between humans and computer systems.

Advantages

Base32 has two main advantages over Base64:

1. The resulting character set is all one case (usually represented as uppercase), which can often be beneficial when using a case-insensitive filesystem.
2. The result can be included in a URL without encoding any characters.

Base32 alphabet

It uses an alphabet of A–Z, followed by 2–7 (thus "2" actually has a numerical value of 26). 0 and 1 are skipped due to their similarity with the letters O and I.

Alternate versions

An earlier form of base 32 notation was used by programmers working on the Electrologica X1 to represent machine addresses. The "digits" were represented as decimal numbers from 0 to 31. For example, 12-16 would represent the machine address 400.

Another alternative design for Base32 is created by Douglas Crockford, which propses using additional characters for a checksum [1].

References

• RFC 3548

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