If digital data is stored in 0s & 1s, how does the reader know how many of the digits to take into consideration?

Question

Must be a very basic and dumb question. But ‘1001’ can be 9 and also 2 & 1 if ’10’ & ’01’ is taken seperately. I’m confused.

In: 49

Answer 1

Depends on what it’s reading. If it knows in advance to expect ASCII text, then it will count out 8 bits to each letter.

The simplest ruleset which doesn’t limit you at all would be that, after ten letters, there is a single bit which says whether or not the message continues. This ruleset is inefficient as hell but shows a simple solution.