CRAP5

CRAP5 - 5-bit Compact Representation of Alphabetical Patterns

CRAP5 is a 5 bit character encoding. The premise of CRAP5 is that the English alphabet, plus a couple more formatting characters, can be neatly put into just 5 bits, instead of 8.

This means that for every byte, CRAP5 will nibble* off three bits! As such, CRAP5 has an efficiency of 137.5%!

Character Set

The character set for CRAP5 is as follows:

Character	Dec	Hex	Binary
Space	0	0x0	0b00000
A	1	0x1	0b00001
B	2	0x2	0b00010
C	3	0x3	0b00011
D	4	0x4	0b00100
E	5	0x5	0b00101
F	6	0x6	0b00110
G	7	0x7	0b00111
H	8	0x8	0b01000
I	9	0x9	0b01001
J	10	0xA	0b01010
K	11	0xB	0b01011
L	12	0xC	0b01100
M	13	0xD	0b01101
N	14	0xE	0b01110
O	15	0xF	0b01111
P	16	0x10	0b10000
Q	17	0x11	0b10001
R	18	0x12	0b10010
S	19	0x13	0b10011
T	20	0x14	0b10100
U	21	0x15	0b10101
V	22	0x16	0b10110
W	23	0x17	0b10111
X	24	0x18	0b11000
Y	25	0x19	0b11001
Z	26	0x1A	0b11010
.	27	0x1B	0b11011
,	28	0x1C	0b11100
!	29	0x1D	0b11101
?	30	0x1E	0b11110
Newline	31	0x1F	0b11111

Usage

usage: CRAP5 encoder/decoder [-h] [-d] [-i INFILE] [-o OUTFILE] [-u] [-x] [-b]

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -d, --decode          Decode data
  -i INFILE, --infile INFILE
  -o OUTFILE, --outfile OUTFILE
  -u, --uppercase       Print decoded data as uppercase
  -x, --hex             Print encoded data as hex
  -b, --bin             Print encoded data as binary

Example Usage

Encode from STDIN (printed as hex, will be output as bytes by default)

$ echo 'Hello, world!' | crap5 -x
4158c7f0177c984efc

Encode from file

$ crap5 -i hello_world.txt
4158c7f0177c984efc

Decode from STDIN

$ echo 'Hello, world!' | crap5 | crap5 -d
hello, world!

Decode from file

$ echo 'Hello, world!' | crap5 > crap5.txt
$ crap5 -d -i crap5.txt
hello, world!

Usage as a dependency

Because crap5 was designed to operate on STDIN and bytes from files, you will need to either do the same or simulate a byte readable object - for example with BytesIO. Both the encode and decode function are generators, yielding bytes as they encode/decode.

Encode:

>>> import io
>>> import crap5
>>> encoded = b''.join([x for x in crap5.encode(io.BytesIO(b'hello world'))])
b'AX\xc7\x82\xef\x93\x08'

Decode:

>>> import io
>>> import crap5
>>> b''.join([x for x in crap5.decode(io.BytesIO(b'AX\xc7\x82\xef\x93\x08'))]).lower()
b'hello world'

FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions

• Q: When should I use this?
  • A: Never. Please don't use CRAP5.

Appendix

• * Pun intended.