On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 6:48 PM, Thomas Gries mail@tgries.de wrote:
Was there a certain reason to chose base 36 ? Why not recoding to base 62 and saving 3 bytes per checksum ?
I don't know, this was way, way before my time. But then, why use base 62 if you can use base 64? Encoders/decoders for that are much more widely available. PHP's base_convert() will go up to 36, I think, so you'd have to write a base 62 encoder/decoder yourself, but PHP has built-in functions to deal with base 64.
base 16 = CHAR(32) md5 sum in hexadecimal base 36 = CHAR(25) base 62 = CHAR(22)
Minor detail: I think it's more likely we'll use SHA-1 hashes rather than MD5 hashes.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)