Question

I would like to know if I could save some space by compressing small strings of sentences that I have to use base 62 instead of binary.

$string = 'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore';

$string = pack("nc*", $string); // Doesn't work

$base62 = gmp_strval(gmp_init($string, 2), 62);

I would assume that base 62 would take less space than the ASCII version of the binary.

Answer 1

No. Without restricting the content, an arbitrary string has 8 bits of data per character, and base62 limits you to slightly under 6 bits per character, so you’ll get an expansion of around 25% by doing this.

You’ll need to use a real compression algorithm (e.g, deflate) to compress data.