What symbols are used after base 36

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/270747

  •  06-07-2019
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Question

Since Hex (base 16) uses 0-9A-F, and (I'm assuming here) Base 17 uses 0-9A-G and so on. What symbols are used once 0-9A-Z are all used up.

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Solution

There is no standard answer for your question. "Base 36" is coincidentally convenient to talk about because:

  1. Hexadecimal conventionally uses 0-9a-f, so it's "obvious" to keep going through the alphabet.
  2. The Roman/ASCII alphabet runs out of steam at 'z'.
  3. Base 36 (regardless of how you represent it) is mildly interesting from a Mathematical perspective because 36 has so many divisors.

However, there's no universally-accepted convention for what sequence of characters one might venture into after 'z'.

OTHER TIPS

Well, look at base 64: 0-9, A-Z, a-z and then a few symbols depending on the context. (Base64 for the web tends to be different to other schemes to avoid URL/HTML encoding issues.)

Digital clocks (base-60) use base-10 numbers as symbols and separate them with a separator symbol (like ':'). This way you'd never run out of symbols!

The Babylonians used Sexagesimal math with base 10 numbers in groupings to form base 60 digits for the various 60's places. (This is where we get all the base-60 math used in angles and time.) This is probably the oldest precedent for the method of creating some some form of base-N digit using base-10 numbers.

Base64 adds the lowercase characters and + and /.

The standard way to write IPv4 adresses can be viewed as a base 256 representation, where decimal numbers are separated by points.

well there's base64, and then Pokemon characters

I'd go for 0-9, then A-Z capitals, then alpha to omega in lower case. That gets you to 60. After that, I'd go with Jeremy's answer.

That's easy: 0..9 ++ A..Z ++ a..z ++ 阿..中. Couldn't be simpler.

I would say Greek and Hebrew are two likely candidates, as they are used in mathematics.

chinese maybe? wikipedia says that there are 47,035 characters in the Kangxi Dictionary!

RAD50 got it to 40 (which is 50 in octal), not quite following this sequence. But hex wasn't so common then. Nor was lowercase.

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