Compress 21 Alphanumeric Characters in to 16 Bytes

Question

I\'m trying to take 21 bytes of data which uniquely identifies a trade and store it in a 16 byte char array. I\'m having trouble coming up with the right algor

Answer 1

If it can only contain letters, then you have less than 64 possibilities per character (26 upper case, 26 lower case, leaving you 12 for space, terminator, underscore, etc). With 6 bits per character, you should get there - in 15 characters. Assuming you don't support special characters.