No project description provided
Project description
WordyBin
What the world needs is yet another word-based encoding system for binary data. In this case, a 16-bit encoding system, with one of 512 5-letter words standing in for the first 9 bits, and one of 128 3-letter words standing in for the next 7 bits.
Why?
- Because the words are fixed length, the encoded string length has a stepwise linear relationship to the source data. This can be advantageous for humans who are trying to eyeball something, and stands in contrast to encodings like BIP39.
- Every word can be uniquely pronounceable, such that there is no ambiguity when restricted to the list of common 5 letter English words. A lot of effort has been put into making 'hearing' these words read be as unambigous as possible.
- Additionally, every word can have its accent on the first syllable, to make reading out loud easier.
The words are built on prior art; mostly, this is the
BIP39 English wordlist,
filtered to 5 and 3-letter words, then filtered again for various
words that don't fit the above restrictions or that I felt like
dropping for no particular reason. Since this leaves less than 512
words, I added some 4-letter words from the BIPS wordlist that have
can have an adjectival version ending in y
. There were not enough
3-letter words, and many of them diverged from the given criteria, so
I added quite a few of those to get to 128.
Why would I actually use this?
There are a lot of cases where we want to represent something
determinstically and uniquely. One of the common cases is to provide a
unique, unopinionated, compressed reference to it. This is sometimes
called a hash
.
Hashes have really nice properties, but they also have some not-nice
properties, and perhaps the main one is that they are just a jumble of
characters. For instance, here is a shortened, 8-character hash of a
commit from the BIP39 repo: ce1862ac
. That hash contains 32 bits of
entropy, which is sufficient in most cases to uniquely identify a
moment in time in the life of your repository.
What it isn't is memorable, or easy to communicate. But 32 bits is
very easy to communicate using WordyBin, because you can use 4 words
to represent those three bytes. ce1862ac
(in hexadecimal) is
SprayCowHandyFee
in WordyBin. I bet you can remember that for long
enough to switch browser tabs!
Installation/Usage
pip install wordybin
- encode:
cat <file> | python -m wordybin
python -m wordybin --input-file <file>
- decode:
echo "DirtyGumCycleGetCrossFoxCrazyFog" | python -m wordybin -d > output.b
python -m wordybin -d --input-file input.b --output-file output.b
Project details
Release history Release notifications | RSS feed
Download files
Download the file for your platform. If you're not sure which to choose, learn more about installing packages.