Binary, hex, Base64, Morse and the other ways data gets rewritten without changing meaning. What encoding is for, why it is not encryption, and the conversions programmers reach for daily.
Converting ASCII to hex means taking each character of text and writing its number code in hexadecimal. The letter A has the ASCII code 65, which is 41 in hex, so the text A becomes 41. The same idea lets you convert ASCII to binary, decimal, octal, Unicode, and more, because every character is really … Read more
To convert binary to decimal, you add up the place values wherever the binary number has a 1. Binary 1101 has a 1 in the eight, four, and one positions, so it is 8 plus 4 plus 1, which is 13. The same binary string can also be written as hexadecimal or octal, and each … Read more
To convert binary to text, you turn each group of eight bits back into the character it stands for. Computers store every letter and symbol as a number, and that number is held in binary, so a string like 01001000 01101001 is really just the word Hi written the way a machine keeps it. This … Read more
Free online converters do one job well: they take data in one format and hand it back in another. Convert a binary string into readable text, a BMP photo into a PNG, a Base64 blob into an image, a column of JSON into a CSV row. Each is a small, exact task that is slow … Read more
Base64 encoding is the reason you can paste an image straight into a CSS file, send a photo as an email attachment, or store a whole file inside a single line of JSON. It takes raw binary data and rewrites it using only plain text characters that survive being sent anywhere. This guide explains Base64 … Read more
Number systems are the different ways of writing the same value. The quantity that decimal writes as 255, binary writes as 11111111, and hexadecimal writes as FF. These are not different numbers. They are the same amount in different notation. Computers rely on several of these notations at once, and knowing how they relate explains … Read more
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