Ascii85 provides an effecient packing of four bytes into five printable characters. (More compact that uuencode or Base64)

The symbol set is 0–9, A–Z, a–z, and then the 23 characters !#$%&()*+-;<=>?@^_`{|}~. This avoids certain problematic characters "',./:[]\ which allows for embedding data in code strings or JSON streams.

See this wiki page for the background.

Ways to use:

• asc85.c

A set of C routines for packing and unpacking longs, and higher level routines for unpacking/packing buffers.

• test.c

A test framework to verify operation. Takes a step value for sequential tests as an optional argument.

• base85.c

A command line tool for encoding/decoding ascii85 (rfc) streams. See base85.md for usage.

• gen85.pl

Code to generate the ascii85 & dasci85 code tables. If you want to use an alternate alphabet, use this code to generate new tables for asc85.c