Allow Special Characters in New Encoding

[kyzer-davis]

• Does the encoding utilize special characters other than numbers/letters.
• Usually as the encoding base goes up, so does the items in the alphabet
• Note: This excludes padding/checksums which are discussed separately.

[bradleypeabody]

Just dropping a note here that, in additional to many others, another case I've run into where punctuation gets in the way is database table names. On multiple projects I've run into situations where a database table needs to be created that contains the ID of another record (example: a stream of log data from a hardware device on the order of gigabytes over time, works better to keep each device as it's own database table that can be backed up, truncated, moved to another server, etc. separately). In this case having punctuation such as "-" causes a problem. I was using url-safe base64 of the bytes of a UUID on two separate projects and had to convert "-" to "$" (which, unintuitively, happens to be a valid character in MySQL tables names). Just wanted to mention this as an example of some of the nonsense I've personally run into by choosing encodings that have non-alphanumeric characters.