Salt
DataDefinition
A salt is random data added to a password before hashing. Salting ensures that identical passwords produce different hashes, preventing rainbow table attacks and revealing that two users have the same password. Modern password hashing algorithms (bcrypt, argon2) include salt automatically.
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Base64
Base64 is a binary-to-text encoding scheme that represents binary data using 64 printable ASCII characters (A-Z, a-z, 0-9, +, /). It increases data size by ~33% but allows binary data to be safely transmitted over text-only channels like email and URLs.
URL Encoding
URL encoding (percent-encoding) converts characters that are not allowed in URLs into a safe format by replacing them with a % followed by two hexadecimal digits. Spaces become %20 or +, special characters like & and = are encoded when used in query parameters.
UTF-8
UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode. It represents each character using 1 to 4 bytes and is the dominant encoding on the web (used by ~98% of websites). UTF-8 is backward compatible with ASCII — the first 128 characters use one byte each.
ASCII
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a character encoding standard that assigns numbers 0-127 to characters: 0-31 are control characters, 32-127 are printable characters (letters, digits, punctuation). ASCII is the basis for UTF-8 and most modern text encodings.