🧬 Base4DNA

All life is Base-4 encoded.
This library just admits it.

Base4DNA is a tiny, playful, and fully deterministic encoding that represents binary data using only four characters:

A C G T

Each character encodes 2 bits, inspired by DNA nucleotides.
It’s a joke implementation — but a correct, reversible, and well-tested one.

✨ Features

• 🧪 Base-4 encoding using A C G T
• 🔁 Lossless & reversible
• 🧠 Simple, explicit bit mapping
• 🔊 Readable aloud (“A C G T”)
• 📄 Safe for text, logs, QR codes, and copy-paste
• 🦕 Zero dependencies
• 🧪 Exhaustively tested (all 256 byte values)

🧠 Encoding Rule

Each byte (8 bits) is split into 4 chunks of 2 bits:

Bits	DNA
00	A
01	C
10	G
11	T

Example

0xCA = 11001010
      11 00 10 10
       T  A  G  G

0xFE = 11111110
      11 11 11 10
       T  T  T  G

➡️ Encoded as:

TAGGTTTG

🚀 Usage

Encode / Decode bytes

import { Base4DNA } from "https://code4fukui.github.io/Base4DNA/Base4DNA.js";

const bytes = new Uint8Array([0xCA, 0xFE]);
const dna = Base4DNA.encode(bytes);

console.log(dna);
// TAGGTTTG

const back = Base4DNA.decode(dna);
console.log(back);
// Uint8Array [202, 254]

Encode / Decode UTF-8 strings

const dna = Base4DNA.encodeString("Hello DNA 🧬", 8);
console.log(dna);

const text = Base4DNA.decodeString(dna);
console.log(text);

✂️ Grouping (Human-Friendly)

Base4DNA.encode(bytes, 4);
// TAGG-TTTG

Decoding ignores spaces and common separators automatically.

🧪 Testing

Run all tests (including exhaustive byte tests):

deno test

⚠️ Notes

• Not compression
• Output is 4× longer than raw bytes
• Designed for fun, education, and visual encodings

🔗 References

• How does string represent DNA sequence? - Engine Trouble, 2016 https://enginetrouble.net/2016/12/how-does-string-represent-dna-sequence.html

📜 License

CC0 / Public Domain.