bubble-babble

Bubble Babble

Similar to base64, bubble babble is intended to provide human-readable encoding of arbitrary binary data. Unlike base64, bubble babble is intended to be pronouncable and easier to remember.

Example usage

$ echo -n "" | bb
xexax

$ echo -n 1234567890 | bb
xesef-disof-gytuf-katof-movif-baxux

$ echo -n Pineapple | bb
xigak-nyryk-humil-bosek-sonax

$ echo -n 1234567890 | bb | bb -d
1234567890

$ echo -n Pineapple | bb | bb -d
Pineapple

$ dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1M count=32 status=none | tee /tmp/testing.data | bb > /tmp/bb.txt
$ md5sum /tmp/testing.data
3cc80d74a560700fe5c8f0bb81090342  /tmp/testing.data
$ bb -d < /tmp/bb.txt | md5sum
3cc80d74a560700fe5c8f0bb81090342  -

Known issues

Decoding doesn't handle pipe buffering very well:

$ time ( dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1M count=32 status=none | bb | bb -d > /dev/null )
Invalid input: missing dash delimiter. (Got a 'x' with value 120 instead.)

real	0m0.092s
user	0m0.090s
sys	0m0.067s

This can be ameliorated using buffer (which probably isn't installed by default, but will be in your package manager).

$ time ( dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1M count=32 status=none | bb | buffer | bb -d > /dev/null )

real	0m2.828s
user	0m3.170s
sys	0m3.295s