There's a lot of data out there in graph6 format (e.g. Gordon Royle's collections) so it is good that Sage supports it (and should continue to do so). This would certainly cause pain if there was a movement for any kind of wholesale conversion. But for Trac, cut/paste, doctests, etc, etc, I think it would make sense to have something like a Base-64 encoding that is more robust, and it should follow the ordering of graph6 as closely as possible, perhaps even sharing code right up to the byte-to-character conversion step.
Base-64 defines '=' as a termination character. We could use that as a sentinel to distinguish the two formats (but I can't recall if = appears in graph6). sparse6 uses a leading ':' to mark the format - something like that could be used to mark dense and sparse Base-64 versions. There is Python library code for Base-64, but I suspect it is meant to convert binary data, rather than the binary sequence extracted from an adjacency matrix. http://docs.python.org/library/base64.html Rob --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
