@keks

Right, should have been 0x11.

When we write numbers in natural text, we use a variable-length encoding, e.g. 17 instead of 00000017 (imagine that the latter was exactly eight bytes of information, I'm too lazy to calculate how many leading zeros we'd need and dealing with padding issues). If we choose to flat-out encode all eight bytes, that is what formats like base64 where designed to do. Basically we turn the number into an array [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0x11], then base64 encode the whole thing, yielding AAAAAAAAABE= (we can choose to drop the padding "=").

Alternatively we can do the natural-text, variable-length encoding by dropping all leading zero digits (A in the case of base64). So 17 just becomes BE. My point was that BE (radix 64) is not as human-friendly as 17 (radix 10) or 11 (radix 16).

I need to stop now, university stuff... Hope this clarified my intended meaning a bit.