Encoding arbitrary data into numbers?

Question

Is there a common method to encode and decode arbitrary data so the encoded end result consists of numbers only - like base64_encode but without the letters?

Fictitious example:

$encoded = numbers_encode("Mary had a little lamb");

echo $encoded; // outputs e.g. 12238433742239423742322 (fictitious result)

$decoded = numbers_decode("12238433742239423742322");

echo $decoded; // outputs "Mary had a little lamb"

Answer 1

Well, that would be "base 8" encoding rather than Base 64. This is better know as Octal.

All Base64 does is convert bit streams in to 6 bit blocks (0-63), and assigns a character from a 64 character character set. Octal uses 3 bits, 0-7. So it COULD use ABCDEFGH, but instead uses 0-7. You can't (easily) use 0-9 because 0-9 is up to 4 bits, but not completely 4 bits. That's what makes it a lousy encoding for binary data.

Answer 2

Very simple example - it represents every input byte as 3-digit decimal number:

function data2numbers ($data) {
    $out = "";
    for ($i = 0; $i < strlen ($data); $i++) {
        $out .= sprintf ("%03d", ord ($data[$i]));
    }
    return $out;
}

Downside is that it triples size of any input data (every input byte is represented as three output bytes).

Decoding function is left as an exercise to the reader;)

Answer 3

Regardless of how you encode you'll always end back up at a smaller base. It may be possible to shrink the resultant integer a bit smaller with some dechex() conversions but ultimately you'll only save a few characters. That being said, the number really balloons the moment you start representing multi-byte characters with 0-9.

I have to wonder if integers as IDs, representing words, or complete strings, wouldn't provide a smaller footprint. Not really a direct encoding but a viable option.

@el.pescado gets credit for the first half but he did challenge the reader. So, I responded (mainly because I wanted to understand what's happening).

function pekka_encode($s) {
    $out = '';
    for ($i=0;$i<strlen($s); $i++) {
        $out .= sprintf("%03d", ord($s[$i]));     
    }
    return $out;
}

function pekka_decode($s) {
    $out = '';
    for ($i=0;$i<strlen($s);$i+=3) {
        $out .= chr($s[$i].$s[$i+1].$s[$i+2]);
    }
    return $out;
}

Answer 4

You can think of a (single byte character) string as a base-256 encoded number where "\x00" represents 0, ' ' (space, i.e., "\x20") represents 32 and so on until "\xFF", which represents 255.

A representation only with numbers 0-9 can be accomplished simply by changing the representation to base 10.

Note that "base64 encoding" is not actually a base conversion. base64 breaks the input into groups of 3 bytes (24 bits) and does the base conversion on those groups individually. This works well because a number with 24 bits can be represented with four digits in base 64 (2^24 = 64^4).

This is more or less what el.pescado does – he splits the input data into 8-bit pieces and then converts the number into base 10. However, this technique has one disadvantage relatively to base 64 encoding – it does not align correctly with the byte boundary. To represent a number with 8-bits (0-255 when unsigned) we need three digits in base 10. However, the left-most digit has less information than the others. It can either be 0, 1 or 2 (for unsigned numbers).

A digit in base 10 stores log(10)/log(2) bits. No matter the chunk size you choose, you're never going to be able to align the representations with 8-bit bytes (in the sense of "aligning" I've described in the paragraph before). Consequently, the most compact representation is a base conversion (which you can see as if it were a "base encoding" with only one big chunk).

Here is an example with bcmath.

bcscale(0);
function base256ToBase10(string $string) {
    //argument is little-endian
    $result = "0";
    for ($i = strlen($string)-1; $i >= 0; $i--) {
        $result = bcadd($result,
            bcmul(ord($string[$i]), bcpow(256, $i)));
    }
    return $result;
}
function base10ToBase256(string $number) {
    $result = "";
    $n = $number;
    do {
        $remainder = bcmod($n, 256);
        $n = bcdiv($n, 256);
        $result .= chr($remainder);
    } while ($n > 0);

    return $result;
}

For

$string = "Mary had a little lamb";
$base10 = base256ToBase10($string);
echo $base10,"\n";
$base256 = base10ToBase256($base10);
echo $base256;

we get

36826012939234118013885831603834892771924668323094861
Mary had a little lamb

Since each digit encodes only log(10)/log(2)=~3.32193 bits expect the number to tend to be 140% longer (not 200% longer, as would be with el.pescado's answer).