it’s just a bunch of 0’s and 1’s.. like I can just put a bunch of them and somehow make a sentence??? like what does this mean -> 010100101001010010 (i legit just spammed 0’s and 1’s)
In: 0
Any symbol we write only has meaning that we assign to it. Why does “a” mean a single object? Why does the letter make the sound it does? Well, it turns out that you only really need two symbols to be able to encode any possible number, and you can assign a number to any specific meaning. We call such a definition an “encoding”.
We call a single binary digit a bit. For ease of usage, it is very common to write binary numbers as hexadecimal, which basically lets us write 4 binary digits as one character, also known as a nibble, storing the numbers from 0-15 as 0-9 and A-F, starting with 0x to indicate its hex. So 0x0 is 0000 binary or 0 decimal; 0xF is 1111 binary or 15 decimal. Modern computers typically work on the basis of 8 bits at a time, which is known as a byte and will be two hexadecimal numbers.
For text, we normally use Unicode, which is frequently encoded specifically as UTF-8 (about 99% of websites currently), which is explicitly designed to be an extension of the older ASCII encoding. This defines the number 0x41 or 0100 0001 binary or 65 decimal as the uppercase letter A, or 0x61 or 0110 0001 or 97 decimal as the lower case letter a. The rest of the Latin letters just count up from those, with any symbols or other characters having their own patterns.
Other commonly known encodings include JPEG, MP3, and MP4, which store images, sound, or movies, respectively. There are thousands of publicly known encodings, and millions more private ones.
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