# Pastebin CSMFOG7Q
16:45 <zvrba> manveru: yup, len is length in base-32 digits, then it iterates from the most significant digit, calculates which bits to extract and maps 5 bits at a time to a character
16:45 <zvrba> i,j are byte and bit positions which to extract
16:46 <manveru> ah, i forgot that you can go across array values in C...
16:46 <zvrba> & 0x1f is necessary to mask out the high-order bits
16:46 <clever> manveru: thats a std::string, so it wont segfault, it will instead throw an exception
16:47 <zvrba> clever: operator[] doesn't throw an exception; .at() does.
16:48 <zvrba> manveru: hash is a bitstring stored as contiguous array of 8-bit chars in memory. extract 5 bits at a time starting from the end, convert each 5 bits to a char, append them to a string.