Text to Binary

Text is stored as binary through a character encoding. ASCII maps 128 characters to 7-bit codes (0–127). Extended ASCII uses 8 bits (0–255). Unicode (UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32) extends this to cover all world scripts. In UTF-8: ASCII characters (0–127) are stored as a single byte; higher code points use 2–4 bytes. Each byte is 8 bits, so "A" (ASCII 65) = 01000001 in binary.

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) defines 128 characters (7 bits): English letters, digits, punctuation, and control codes. It was developed in the 1960s. Unicode defines over 1.1 million code points covering all writing systems, emoji, and symbols. UTF-8 is the dominant encoding: it is backwards compatible with ASCII (code points 0–127 are identical) and uses variable-length encoding (1–4 bytes per character).

A bit is the smallest unit of information: either 0 or 1. A byte is 8 bits, capable of representing 256 (2⁸) different values. Text encoding maps characters to byte values: the letter "A" = decimal 65 = hex 0x41 = binary 01000001. A nibble is 4 bits (half a byte). A word is typically 16 or 32 bits depending on the processor architecture.

Binary in programming: bitwise operations (AND, OR, XOR, NOT, bit shifts), flags and bitmasks for compact boolean storage, network protocols and binary file formats, cryptographic operations, low-level hardware control, RGB color values (each channel is 8 bits: 0–255), IP address representation, and understanding character encoding bugs. Hex (base-16) is commonly used as a shorthand for binary since 1 hex digit = 4 bits.

Multiply each bit by its positional power of 2, summing from right to left. Binary 01000001: bit 0 × 2⁰ = 1, bit 6 × 2⁶ = 64. Sum = 65 = ASCII "A". Shortcut: for 8-bit binary, the bit values are 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1 from left to right. Add the values of all 1 bits. Example: 11111111 = 128+64+32+16+8+4+2+1 = 255.