Base 36 - Uses in Practice

Uses in Practice

• The Remote Imaging Protocol for bulletin board systems used base 36 notation for transmitting coordinates in a compact form.
• Many URL redirection systems like TinyURL or SnipURL/Snipr also use base 36 integers as compact alphanumeric identifiers.
• Geohash-36, a coordinate encoding algorithm uses radix 36 but uses a mixture of lowercase and uppercase alphabet characters in order to avoid vowels, vowel-looking numbers, and other character confusion.
• Various systems such as RickDate use base 36 as a compact representation of Gregorian dates in file names, using one digit each for the day and the month.
• Dell uses a 5 or 7 digit base 36 number (Service Tag) as a compact version of their Express Service Codes.
• The software package SalesLogix uses base 36 as part of its database identifiers.
• The TreasuryDirect website, which allows individuals to buy and redeem securities directly from the U.S. Department of the Treasury in paperless electronic form, serializes security purchases in an account using a 4 digit base 36 number. However, the Latin letters A-Z are used before the Arabic numerals 0-9, so that the purchases are listed as AAAA, AAAB... AAAZ, AAA0, AAA1... AAA9, AABA...
• The E-mail client program PMMail encodes the UNIX time of the email's arrival and uses this for the first six characters of the message's filename.
• MediaWiki stores uploaded files in directories with names derived from the base-36 representation of an uploaded file's checksum.
• Siteswap, a type of juggling notation, frequently employs 0-9 and a-z to signify the dwell time of a toss (which may roughly be thought of as the height of the throw). Throws higher than 'z' may be made but no notation has widespread acceptance for these throws.
• In SEDOL securities identifiers, the check digit is computed from a weighted sum of the first six characters, each character interpreted in base-36.
• In the International Securities Identification Number (ISIN), the check digit is computed by first taking the value of each character in base-36, concatenating the numbers together, then doing a weighted sum.
• Reddit uses base-36 for identifying posts and comments