base16 0.1.1

base16 is like hexadecimal, but with an alphabet chosen to minimise human transcription errors.

base16

base16 is hexidecimal encoding with a different character set - chosen to minimize ambiguity between letters. It is useful for human-input codes. By default, we map alphanumeric characters outside the base16 character set to ones of closest similarity [1] within it.

Character set map

Hexidecimal	base16
0	A
1	B
2	C
3	D
4	E
5	G
6	H
7	K
8	P
9	R
a	S
b	T
c	W
d	X
e	Y
f	Z

Usage

Install

pip install base16

Python

import base16

encoded = base16.encode(b'Hello, World!')
decoded = base16.decode(b'EPHGHWHWHZCWCAKKHZKCHWHECB')

Command Line

bash16 --encode "Hello, World!"
bash16 --decode "EPHGHWHWHZCWCAKKHZKCHWHECB"

Fuzzy Matching

When decoding characters outside the base16 charset, we substitute a valid character that is most commonly mistaken for it.

Invalid	Valid
0	D
1	T
2	Z
3	E
4	A
5	S
6	G
7	T
8	B
9	P
F	E
I	T
J	T
L	E
M	W
N	H
O	D
Q	D
U	W
V	Y

Letter mappings above were chosen based on confusion scores in [1].

References

[1] Gupta, S.M. et al., Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1983, 83, 144-149