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by dbaupp 814 days ago
I implicitly ignored encoding schemes like base 36 and 32 (and 16, referenced elsewhere in the thread) because they're not as good as the schemes referenced in the post. The best you can get that's fully URL safe with Alphanumeric is a hypothetical base 39, referenced in a footnote, and only using 39 of the 45 possible characters has 3.9% overhead (even ignoring the 50% overhead of the https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9285.html encoding).

I've added an analysis of many more bases to the article: https://huonw.github.io/blog/2024/03/qr-base10-base64/#fn:ot...