azuchi / base58

Base58 is a Ruby library/gem for converting ints to and from base58.

Base58

Ruby gem for encoding/decoding integers to/from Base58. Supports Flickr, Bitcoin, and Ripple alphabets.

Usage

Converting an integer into a Base58 string:

Base58.int_to_base58(12345) # => "4ER"

Converting a Base58 string to the represented integer:

Base58.base58_to_int("A2Ph") # => 6639914

Converting binary into a Base58 string:

Base58.binary_to_base58("\xCE\xE99\x86".force_encoding('BINARY')) # => "6hKMCS"

Converting a Base58 string to the represented binary:

Base58.base58_to_binary("6hKMCS") # => "\xCE\xE99\x86"

Installation

Install base58 with the following command

gem install base58

Or add it to your Gemfile

gem 'base58'

Then run bundle install.

What is Base58?

From Wikipedia:

Base58 is a group of binary-to-text encoding schemes used to represent large integers as alphanumeric text. It is similar to Base64 but has been modified to avoid both non-alphanumeric characters and letters which might look ambiguous when printed. It is therefore designed for human users who manually enter the data, copying from some visual source, but also allows easy copy and paste because a double-click will usually select the whole string.

Base58 alphabets are made up of the characters a-z, A-Z, and 0-9, with visually ambiguous characters (0, O, I, l) removed.

Supported Alphabets

This library supports three of the most common Base58 alphabets, which have identical, but differently sorted characters.

Alphabets can be selected by passing a symbol to the second argument of Base58.int_to_base58 and Base58.base58_to_int.

Base58.int_to_base58(12345, :bitcoin)

:flickr is the default if no second argument is passed.

Flickr

Identifier: :flickr

This is the default alphabet. Used to generate Flickr short URLs. The order of it's characters is numeric, lowercase-alpha, uppercase-alpha.

123456789abcdefghijkmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZ

Bitcoin

Identifier: :bitcoin

The alphabet used by the Bitcoin protocol. The order of it's characters is numeric, uppercase-alpha, lowercase-alpha.

123456789ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijkmnopqrstuvwxyz

See the "Leading Zeros" section for enabling full Bitcoin-style leading-zeros support.

Ripple

Identifier: :ripple

The alphabet used by the Ripple protocol. The order of the characters were chosen such that the low values match the primitives of the protocol.

rpshnaf39wBUDNEGHJKLM4PQRST7VWXYZ2bcdeCg65jkm8oFqi1tuvAxyz

Leading Zeroes

Some protocols, such as Bitcoin, require that leading zeros be encoded. Passing true to the third argument of binary_to_base58()` will enable this behaviour.

bitcoin_address_hex = '00000000000000000000123456789ABCDEF0'
bitcoin_address_bin = [bitcoin_address_hex].pack('H*')

Base58.binary_to_base58(bitcoin_address_bin, :bitcoin, true) # => 111111111143c9JGph3DZ

Contributing

Source repository is on Github, please file issues and pull requests there.

Documentation

Documentation can be found online at RubyDoc.info.

Alternatively, you can generate docs from the project root with:

rake rdoc

Credits

• Joel Nordell for various Bitcoin/Ripple support features.
• Jim Myhrberg for argument checking and method aliases.

Copyright and Licence

Copyright (c) 2009 - 2018, Douglas F Shearer.

Base58 is licensed under the MIT Licence.