Articles in Encoding & Text category

A rigorous treatment of Base64 from first principles: the mathematical basis for the 64-character alphabet (2⁶ = largest power-of-two mapping to printable ASCII), RFC 4648 canonical specification, the BaseN encoding family (Base16 through Base85 with size/alphabet trade-offs), streaming encoder and decoder state machines, MIME line-wrapping rules, PEM format anatomy, constant-time decoding for cryptographic contexts, SIMD-accelerated lookup tables, and production boundary advice for JWTs, data URLs, and HTTP Basic Auth.

A rigorous guide to character encoding: distinguish code points from bytes, compare ASCII, Unicode, UTF-8 and UTF-16, debug mojibake, escape HTML in the correct context, and convert Unicode text without corrupting non-ASCII characters.

Use Data URLs deliberately. This guide covers RFC 2397 syntax, percent and Base64 encoding, MIME and charset handling, opaque origins, CSP and navigation risks, cache trade-offs, size measurement, Blob URLs, and safe browser/server examples.

Learn how bcrypt password hashing works, calibrate its cost factor on production hardware, read the 60-character hash structure, and compare bcrypt with Argon2id and scrypt using Node.js, Python, Java, and Go.

A comprehensive guide to Emoji history, Unicode encoding principles, cross-platform display differences, and practical development tips and best practices.

A practical, standards-aware Markdown guide. Learn CommonMark core syntax, GFM extensions, flavor detection, headings, links, images, tables, code, HTML, math, Mermaid, accessibility, sanitization, and why Markdown-to-HTML conversion is not automatically lossless or safe.

A practical number-to-words guide covering English and Chinese conventions, regional check formats, exact currency handling, validation, and tested JavaScript and Python implementation patterns.

A technical deep-dive into QR Code internals covering the ISO/IEC 18004 encoding pipeline (mode selection, data placement serpentine path, masking penalty scoring), Reed-Solomon error correction over GF(2⁸) with generator polynomial construction, the 8 mask patterns and their evaluation functions, QR Code security threats (QRLjacking, phishing overlays, URL injection), Micro QR and rMQR variants, and how scanner image-processing pipelines locate and decode symbols from camera frames.

A technical deep-dive into text processing algorithms covering Unicode text segmentation (UAX #29 grapheme cluster, word, and sentence boundaries), locale-aware case mapping (Turkic I problem, Greek sigma, German ß), readability scoring models (Flesch-Kincaid, Coleman-Liau, their mathematical foundations and limitations), slug generation with proper Unicode NFKD transliteration, and number-to-words systems across languages (short/long scale, grammatical agreement).

Learn how Geohash encodes latitude and longitude into hierarchical grid keys. This guide explains precision, boundary cases, neighbor-cell queries, database indexing, and why exact distance or spatial predicates are still required.

A standards-grounded guide to URL percent-encoding covering RFC 3986 URI component grammar, reserved vs unreserved character sets, the UTF-8 encoding pipeline for non-ASCII, the critical difference between application/x-www-form-urlencoded and RFC 3986, double-encoding vulnerabilities, URL normalization for comparison, and cross-language API behavior in JavaScript, Python, Go, and Java.

Master URL encoding and decoding techniques. Learn special character handling, API data integrity, encodeURIComponent best practices. Includes JavaScript/Python/Java code examples!

A technical deep-dive into character encoding covering UTF-8's design properties (self-synchronization, prefix-free codes, ASCII compatibility, byte-order independence), Unicode normalization forms (NFC/NFD/NFKC/NFKD) and their security implications, encoding attack vectors (overlong UTF-8 sequences, homoglyph attacks, bidirectional override exploits), the CJK encoding wars and codepage legacy, MySQL utf8 vs utf8mb4, Python str vs bytes boundary, and the WHATWG Encoding Standard that governs web platform behavior.