Storing UUID as base64 String

Question

I have been experimenting with using UUIDs as database keys. I want to take up the least amount of bytes as possible, while still keeping the UUID representation human read

Answer 1

You can safely drop the padding "==" in this application. If you were to decode the base-64 text back to bytes, some libraries would expect it to be there, but since you are just using the resulting string as a key, it's not a problem.

I'd use Base-64 because its encoding characters can be URL-safe, and it looks less like gibberish. But there's also Base-85. It uses more symbols and codes 4 bytes as 5 characters, so you could get your text down to 20 characters.