base91

A Base91 Encoder & Decoder for Haskell

Monthly Downloads: 14

Programming language: Haskell

License: MIT License

Tags: Codec    

Latest version: v2.1.1

README

base91

A Base91 Encoder & Decoder for Haskell, written by Alvaro J. Genial.

[](LICENSE)

Synopsis

This library (and command-line utility) implement generic bidirectional Base91 encoding & decoding following the specification.

Status

The codebase should be considered stable; it is documented using haddock and tested using QuickCheck.

Description

Base91 is a scheme that allows arbitrary binary data (a sequence of 8-bit bytes, or octets) to be represented using an alphabet consisting of 91 of the 95 printable ASCII characters. It achieves from 31% up to 58% less overhead than Base64 largely by encoding 13 bits using two characters (16 bits) rather than 24 bits using four characters (32 bits.)

Alphabet

'A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E', 'F', 'G', 'H', 'I', 'J', 'K', 'L', 'M',
'N', 'O', 'P', 'Q', 'R', 'S', 'T', 'U', 'V', 'W', 'X', 'Y', 'Z',
'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g', 'h', 'i', 'j', 'k', 'l', 'm',
'n', 'o', 'p', 'q', 'r', 's', 't', 'u', 'v', 'w', 'x', 'y', 'z',
'0', '1', '2', '3', '4', '5', '6', '7', '8', '9', '!', '#', '$',
'%', '&', '(', ')', '*', '+', ',', '.', '/', ':', ';', '<', '=',
'>', '?', '@', '[', ']', '^', '_', '`', '{', '|', '}', '~', '"'

Library

The base91 package exposes a single generic Codec.Binary.Base91 module with two functions, the duals of each other:

• encode: Encodes a byte (Word8) input sequence (e.g. [Word8], ByteString, etc.) to a character (Char) output sequence (e.g. [Char], Data.Text, etc.).
• decode: Decodes a character (Char) input sequence (e.g. [Char], Data.Text, etc.) to a byte (Word8) output sequence (e.g. [Word8], ByteString, etc.).

(Note that because the functions' signatures are generic, in some cases an explicit output type must be provided; see the example.)

Example

$ ghci Codec.Binary.Base91
λ let bytes = [72,101,108,108,111,44,32,119,111,114,108,100,33,10]
λ encode bytes :: String -- equal to "Hello, World!\n"
">OwJh>}A\"[email protected]@Y?FF"
λ decode ">OwJh>}A\"[email protected]@Y?FF" :: [Word8]
[72,101,108,108,111,44,32,119,111,114,108,100,33,10]

Utility

$ echo "Hello, World!" | base91 --encode
>OwJh>}AQ;[email protected]@Y?FF
$ echo ">OwJh>}AQ;[email protected]@Y?FF" | base91 --decode
Hello, World!

Usage

import System.Environment (getProgName)

import qualified Codec.Binary.Base91  as Base91
import qualified Data.ByteString      as BS
import qualified Data.Text.IO         as T

main :: IO ()
main = getProgName >>= \name -> case name of
  "b91enc" -> BS.getContents >>= T.putStrLn . Base91.encode
  "b91dec" -> T.getContents >>= BS.putStr . Base91.decode
  _        -> error "invalid program name"

Documentation

The latest documentation can be found on Hackage.

Dependencies

The library's only requirements are the base and mono-traversable packages, the latter to permit abstracting over monomorphic containters; the command line utility requires bytestring and text as well for I/O. Testing requires all the aforementioned plus the QuickCheck package. (See [base91.cabal](./base91.cabal) for details.)

License

This library is distributed under the MIT [LICENSE](./LICENSE.md).