Today I had to deal with some base36 encoded data in Python. Well my first instinct was "my_data".decode("base36") which was a no-go. Next up, poke about in the base64 module since it also does base32 and base16; this netted me similar results. Asking Google got me some results but nothing I liked. It seems that people like to use static strings as lookup tables for the encoding which bothered me. I'm not sure why it bothered me, but it did. Anyhow, so I rolled my own this evening that I plan to use tomorrow. I offer it up to the world as (in my not so humble opinion) a superior choice to the other base36 implementations out there.

Check it out at: http://code.crute.org/dev_urandom/file/tip/python/base36.py

If you find it useful or find a bug let me know. I probably won't be doing much more with it other than bug fixes if there are any.