It can be useful to encode data, such as application state or binary file, into a string that is compressed and safe to use in URL query string or hash, as well as in JSON. For gzip compression and ...

What are the numbers? You can encode 9,999,999,999 in 5 bytes. If you want to store the number in human readable bytes, convert it to Base64 encoding or similar.

We are trying to hack the metadata to pass in a SHA256 hash which is a byte array. But we can't do that if the base library is assuming it is a utf-8 string. We can't convert a SHA256 hash byte array ...