How can I quickly encode and then compress a short string containing numbers in c#

Question

I have strings that look like this:

000101456890
348324000433
888000033380

They are strings that are all the same length and they contain o

Answer 1

To do it simply, you could consider each as a long (plenty of room there), and hex-encode; that gives you:

60c1bfa
5119ba72b1
cec0ed3264

base-64 would be shorter, but you'd need to look at it as big-endian (note most .NET is little-endian) and ignore leading 0 bytes. That gives you:

Bgwb+g==
URm6crE=
zsDtMmQ=

For example:

    static void Main()
    {
        long x = 000101456890L, y = 348324000433L, z = 888000033380L;

        Console.WriteLine(Convert.ToString(x, 16));
        Console.WriteLine(Convert.ToString(y, 16));
        Console.WriteLine(Convert.ToString(y, 16));

        Console.WriteLine(Pack(x));
        Console.WriteLine(Pack(y));
        Console.WriteLine(Pack(z));

        Console.WriteLine(Convert.ToInt64("60c1bfa", 16).ToString().PadLeft(12, '0'));
        Console.WriteLine(Convert.ToInt64("5119ba72b1", 16).ToString().PadLeft(12, '0'));
        Console.WriteLine(Convert.ToInt64("cec0ed3264", 16).ToString().PadLeft(12, '0'));

        Console.WriteLine(Unpack("Bgwb+g==").ToString().PadLeft(12, '0'));
        Console.WriteLine(Unpack("URm6crE=").ToString().PadLeft(12, '0'));
        Console.WriteLine(Unpack("zsDtMmQ=").ToString().PadLeft(12, '0'));

    }
    static string Pack(long value)
    {
        ulong a = (ulong)value; // make shift easy
        List bytes = new List(8);
        while (a != 0)
        {
            bytes.Add((byte)a);
            a >>= 8;
        }
        bytes.Reverse();
        var chunk = bytes.ToArray();
        return Convert.ToBase64String(chunk);
    }
    static long Unpack(string value)
    {
        var chunk = Convert.FromBase64String(value);
        ulong a = 0;
        for (int i = 0; i < chunk.Length; i++)
        {
            a <<= 8;
            a |= chunk[i];
        }
        return (long)a;
    }