Binary & Text: An Intro to Character Encoding
Computers only understand 0 and 1. One English character usually takes 8 bits (1 byte) — for example, uppercase A is ASCII 65, or 01000001 in binary.
Encoding schemes
- ASCII: 128 basic characters, 1 byte
- UTF-8: ASCII-compatible, uses 3 bytes for Chinese, globally universal
- Unicode: assigns every character a number
Hands-on feel
Convert a sentence to binary and decode it back to intuitively grasp 'text is data.'
💡 FreeToolset's text-binary converter uses 8-bit encoding with spaces between bytes — great for learning or sending fun ciphers.