Question

Any ideas or implementations floating about for encoding the current date including the milliseconds into the shortest possible string length?

e.g I want 31/10/2011 10:41:45 in the shortest string possible (ideally 5 characters) – obviously decodable.

If it is impossible to get down to 5 characters, then the year is optional.

edit: it doesn’t actually need to be decodable. It just needs to be a unique string.

Answer 1

You can use ASCII characters to represent the numbers and drop the formatting, for example:

31/10/2011 10:41:45

*/*/** *:*:*

*******

That’s 7, you can drop 2 if you don’t want to include the full year. Obviously the * are actual characters relating to a number, A could be 1 etc, or even use the proper ASCII codes.