Did you ever saw a char and thought: “Damn, 1 byte for a single char is pretty darn inefficient”? No? Well I did. So what I decided to do instead is to pack 5 chars, convert each char to a 2 digit integer and then concat those 5 2 digit ints together into one big unsigned int and boom, I saved 5 chars using only 4 instead of 5 bytes. The reason this works is, because one unsigned int is a ten digit long number and so I can save one char using 2 digits. In theory you could save 32 different chars using this technique (the first two digits of an unsigned int are 42 and if you dont want to account for a possible 0 in the beginning you end up with 32 chars). If you would decide to use all 10 digits you could save exactly 3 chars. Why should anyone do that? Idk. Is it way to much work to be useful? Yes. Was it funny? Yes.
Anyone whos interested in the code: Heres how I did it in C: https://pastebin.com/hDeHijX6
Yes I know, the code is probably bad, but I do not care. It was just a funny useless idea I had.
It is neither useless nor funny. It’s optimization for storage capacity. If everyone in the world put in that level of effort into compression, computer storage and processing would actually be faster than the previous generation.
What was that? I was busy installing a package in my node.js cluster to convert the first letter in a sentence to uppercase.
I feel attacked
Unless you only copy and compare you have to decode it, or implement more complicated logic for everything from searching to concatenation (which is normally just memcopy).
Processing would be quicker?
This would add significant processing overhead because of conversions everwhere. There is a lot of string processing going on inside your CPU already, I’m reasonably sure this would add a measurable overhead.
Plus I believe this would cause even more string related security vulnerabilities to emerge because of additional code that needs to be maintained.
This will actually run much slower. It saves space, but it has to do a bunch of math every time it needs to store or load a string I stead of just outputting it. Maybe if you had really limited cache space this could run faster (since it could save on fetching from RAM/storage), but, unless you’re storing some really long strings, it won’t make a difference.