Base85 Encode/Decode

How Base85 works

• Alphabet: 85 symbols using ASCII characters 33-117 (! to u), excluding some problematic characters.
• Encoding: Groups of 4 bytes are converted to 5 Base85 characters using base-85 arithmetic.
• Decoding: Groups of 5 Base85 characters are converted back to 4 bytes.
• Efficiency: More efficient than Base64, using 5 characters to represent 4 bytes (vs Base64's 4:3 ratio).
• Variants: Ascii85 (Adobe), Z85 (ZeroMQ), and RFC 1924 are common variants with different alphabets.
• Use cases: PDF files, PostScript, some binary data encoding where space efficiency matters.

Base85 Examples