Technology

So, hexadecimal uses 16 characters. Each character stores 4 bits of data (2⁴ = 16).

If you use the 10 digits and 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, the resulting encoding is called Base36.

It is a rather impractical format for storing data, though, because for purposes of simple conversion, the number of possibilities should be a power of 2 -- that way a program can do (quick) bit shifts instead of (difficult, especially on big numbers) division to determine which character to use. That's why it's mostly used to encode numbers, and not large sequences of data.

Base32 is a slightly-smaller variant that can fit 5 bits of data into one character. (2⁵ = 32)

If you add up digits, uppercase and lowercase characters together (differentiating between upper and lower case), you get 62. This is also an impractical number for computer purposes. But add two extra characters and you get 64, which is another nice power of two (2⁶ = 64), letting one character store 6 bits. And Base64 is a common encoding scheme for data.

And when you know how many bits a character can fit, you can calculate how "efficient" the encoding will be and how many characters will be needed to store data. A Base32 encoding will need 20% fewer characters than hexadecimal, and Base64 needs 33.3% fewer.

1. It's a 160-bit hash, so using letters and numbers, it'd be log base (10+26) of 2^160, which is roughly 31. So 31 letters.
2. Using upper and lower case, it'd be log base (10+26+26) of 2^160, or 27 letters.
3. Don't use SHA-1; use SHA-256
4. Upper and lower case to represent SHA-256 would be log base (10+26+26) of 2^256, 43 letters
5. Internally, it's represented using 32 "letters" of 8 bits each, effectively using every possible ASCII character. The string representation is only of consequence when you're exchanging it over a medium where it needs to be robust and human-readable, and probably the benefit from squeezing it down to fewer characters for that representation is not worth the cost in terms of making it unclear how you've chosen to squeeze it and making life difficult for people who are trying to convert to and from the format. Hexadecimal is a little bigger but it's very clear and unambiguous what you've done, whereas using the full alphabet doesn't have that property.

You could try base64 maybe? The above would be: Z3nFNDK4ut8Em7nYkkpXhd2IckM= (28 chrs)

base64 uses A-Z, a-z, 0-9, and the + and / characters to encode 6 bits per character. That means you can encode every 3 bytes (or 6 hex) in 4 characters (since 3 * 8 bits = 4 * 6 bits). If the data are not a perfect multiple of 3 bytes, the last group of 4 characters gets padded out with = signs.

It gets subtle when you consider Unicode. But you said latin alphabet, so you can look at just the UTF-8 section of this table, and assume 1byte = 1letter.

https://github.com/qntm/base32768#base32768

HTH

https://www.unitconverters.net/numbers/decimal-to-base-36.htm

base 10 = 590741618446309885662238049322513167918815539779

base 16 = 6779C53432B8BADF049BB9D8924A5785DD887243

base 36 = C34WAO39N9K9XWPHW5W9XGRH0AHT0CG

Hashing won't fix sloppy typos/grammar.

How much would hash ~~digsets~~ digests be shortened if the whole ~~alphabel~~ alphabet was used ?

Yeah you can always take a hex hash output and convert it to Base64...which does conpress it significantly. Apply LZ Compression and boom.