I had a need for a base32 encoder/decoder, so I spent a couple hours this afternoon throwing this together. I believe it conforms to the standards listed here: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4648#section-6. public class Base32Encoding { public static byte[] ToBytes(string input) { if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(input)) { throw new ArgumentNullException(“input”); } input = input.TrimEnd(‘=’); //remove padding characters int byteCount = … Read more
One hex character can only represent 16 different values, i.e. 4 bits. (16 = 24) 40 × 4 = 160. And no, you need much more than 5 characters in base-36. There are totally 2160 different SHA-1 hashes. 2160 = 1640, so this is another reason why we need 40 hex digits. But 2160 = … Read more
This is similar to the Birthday Problem. Given a group of n people, What is the probability that two share the same birthday1? It’s higher than you’d think. In your case, what are the odds that randomly picking a number between 0 and 1,073,741,823 n times will give you a duplicate? One approximation from the … Read more