Base 32 for JavaScript

Wikipedia:

Base32 is a base 32 transfer encoding using the twenty-six letters A–Z and six digits 2–7. It is primarily used to encode binary data, but is able to encode binary text like ASCII.

Base32 has number of advantages over Base64:

1. The resulting character set is all one case (usually represented as uppercase), which can often be beneficial when using a case-insensitive filesystem, spoken language, or human memory.

2. The result can be used as file name because it can not possibly contain '/' symbol which is usually acts as path separator in Unix-based operating systems.

3. The alphabet was selected to avoid similar-looking pairs of different symbols, so the strings can be accurately transcribed by hand. (For example, the symbol set omits the symbols for 1, 8 and zero, since they could be confused with the letters 'I', 'B', and 'O'.)

4. A result without padding can be included in a URL without encoding any characters.

However, Base32 representation takes roughly 20% more space than Base64.

Documentation

Full documentation at http://mikepb.github.io/base32.js/

Installation

$ npm install base32.js

Usage

Encoding an array of bytes using Crockford:

var base32 = require("base32.js");

var buf = [1, 2, 3, 4];
var encoder = new base32.Encoder({ type: "crockford", lc: true });
var str = encoder.write(buf).finalize();
// str = "04106173"

var decoder = new base32.Decoder({ type: "crockford" });
var out = decoder.write(str).finalize();
// out = [1, 2, 3, 4]

The default Base32 variant if no type is provided is "rfc4648" without padding.

Browser support

The browser versions of the library may be found under the dist/ directory. The browser files are updated on each versioned release, but not for development. Karma is used to run the mocha tests in the browser.

$ npm install -g karma-cli
$ npm run karma

Related projects

• agnoster/base32-js

License

MIT