The sha1 hash for 64test64xa is 6779c53432b8badf049bb9d8924a5785dd887243 which is 41 characters only using hexadecimal, 10digits and 6letters. But how long it would be if it was using the whole 26 letters in the latin alphabet? What if it also differentiated between UPPER and lower cases?
You could try base64 maybe? The above would be: Z3nFNDK4ut8Em7nYkkpXhd2IckM= (28 chrs)
base64 uses A-Z, a-z, 0-9, and the + and / characters to encode 6 bits per character. That means you can encode every 3 bytes (or 6 hex) in 4 characters (since 3 * 8 bits = 4 * 6 bits). If the data are not a perfect multiple of 3 bytes, the last group of 4 characters gets padded out with = signs.
There’s also a Base64URL variant that is a little more friendly in the modern world where the
plus
andslash
often need escape sequences in URLs and filenames. It also doesn’t waste space with padding at the end.