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Comment by JimDabell

The problem with base64url is that ~ and . are not letters. This means that double-clicking on something encoded with base64url isn’t going to select the whole thing if you want to copy-paste it. This is annoying needless friction in a huge number of use cases. Base62 encoding (0-9A-Za-z) is almost as efficient as base64url and retains URL safety but is more easily copy-pasted.

If you want to eliminate ambiguity for human readers, you can drop to Base58 but in almost all cases, if you are BaseXX-encoding something, it’s long enough that copy-pasting is the norm, so it doesn’t usually matter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base62

parent JimDabell 3 years ago

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