Numbers Are for Computers, Strings Are for Humans: How and where software should translate data into a human-readable form

Unless what you are processing, storing, or transmitting are, quite literally, strings that come from and are meant to be shown to humans, you should avoid processing, storing, or transmitting that data as strings. Remember, numbers are for computers, strings are for humans. Let the computer do the work of presenting your data to the humans in a form they might find palatable. That's where those extra bytes and instructions should be spent, not doing the inverse.