Base62x: An alternative approach to Base64 for non-alphanumeric characters

Abstract

In computer systems, printable characters include not only 62 alphanumeric characters (0-9, a-z and A-Z) but also non-alphanumeric characters (e.g. *, \, , %). Base64 is a commonly used encoding scheme that represents binary data in an ASCII string format. However, for Base64, non-alphanumeric characters (e.g. *, \, , %) are problematic for filenames and URLs. For example, + is error-prone in URL and/ is not allowed in filenames. To address this issue, we propose a new method, Base62x, as an alternative approach to Base64. The proposed method is more effective in application development and fully compatible with symbol-sensitive applications, such as, file systems, IP addresses and safe transmission of non-ASCII over the Internet. © 2011 IEEE.