How exactly does binary code get converted into letters

Question

Out of curiosity  how exactly does binary code get converted into letters  I know there are sites that automatically convert binary to words for you but I wanna understand the specific  intermediary steps that binary code goes through before being converted into letters

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Here s a way to convert binary numbers to ASCII characters that is often simple enough to do in your head   1 - Convert every 4 binary digits into one hex digit   Here s a binary to hex conversion chart   0001   1  0010   2  0011   3  0100   4  0101   5 0110   6 0111   7 1000   8  1001   9 1010   a  the hex number a  not the letter a  1011   b 1100   c 1101   d 1110   e 1111   f    The hexadecimal numbers a through f are the decimal numbers 10 through 15  That s what hexadecimal  or  base 16  is - instead of each digit being capable of representing 10 different numbers  0 - 9   like decimal or  base 10  does  each digit is instead capable of representing 16 different numbers  0 - f     Once you know that chart  converting any string of binary digits into a string of hex digits is simple   For example    01000100   0100 0100   44 hex 1010001001110011   1010 0010 0111 0011   a273 hex   Simple enough  right  It is a simple matter to convert a binary number of any length into its hexadecimal equivalent    This works because hexadecimal is base 16 and binary is base 2 and 16 is the 4th power of 2  so it takes 4 binary digits to make 1 hex digit  10  on the other hand  is not a power of 2  so we can t convert binary to decimal nearly as easily    2 - Split the string of hex digits into pairs   When converting a number into ASCII  every 2 hex digits is a character  So break the hex string into sets of 2 digits   You would split a hex number like 7340298b392 this into 6 pairs  like this   7340298b392   07 34 02 98 b3 92    Notice I prepended a 0  since I had an odd number of hex digits    That s 6 pairs of hex digits  so its going to be 6 letters   Except I know right away that 98  b3 and 92 aren t letters  I ll explain why in a minute    3 - Convert each pair of hex digits into a decimal number   Do this by multiplying the  decimal equivalent of the  left digit by 16  and adding the 2nd   For example  b3 hex   11 16   3  which is 110   66   3  which is 179   b hex is 11 decimal    4 - Convert the decimal numbers into ASCII characters   Now  to get the ASCII letters for the decimal numbers  simply keep in mind that in ASCII  65 is an uppercase  A   and 97 is a lowercase  a    So what letter is 68   68 is the 4th letter of the alphabet in uppercase  right  65   A  66   B  67   C  68   D   So 68 is  D    You take the decimal number  subtract 64 for uppercase letters if the number is less than 97  or 96 for lowercase letters if the number is 97 or larger  and that s the number of the letter of the alphabet associated with that set of 2 hex digits     Alternatively  if you re not afraid of a little bit of easy hex arithmetic  you can skip step 3  and just go straight from hex to ASCII  by remembering  for example  that   hex 41    A   hex 61    a    So subtract 40 hex for uppercase letters or 60 hex for lowercase letters  and convert what s left to decimal to get the alphabet letter number   For example   01101100   6c  6c - 60   c   12 decimal    l  01010010   52  52 - 40   12 hex   18 decimal    R     When doing this  it s helpful to remember that  m   or  M   is the 13 letter of the alphabet  So you can count up or down from 13 to find a letter that s nearer to the middle than to either end    I saw this on a shirt once  and was able to read it in my head   01000100 01000001 01000100   I did it like this   01000100   0100 0100   44 hex  - 40 hex   ucase letter 4   D 01000001   0100 0001   41 hex  - 40 hex   ucase letter 1   A 01000100   0100 0100   44 hex  - 40 hex   ucase letter 4   D   The shirt said  DAD   which I thought was kinda cool  since it was being purchased by a pregnant woman  Her husband must be a geek like me     How did I know right away that 92  b3  and 98 were not letters    Because the ASCII code for a lowercase  z  is 96   26   122  which in hex is 7a  7a is the largest hex number for a letter  Anything larger than 7a is not a letter     So that s how you can do it as a human   How do computer programs do it   For each set of 8 binary digits  convert it to a number  and look it up in an ASCII table     That s one pretty obvious and straight forward way  A typical programmer could probably think of 10 or 15 other ways in the space of a few minutes  The details depend on the computer language environment

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Do you mean the conversion 011001100110111101101111   foo  for example  You just take the binary stream  split it into separate bytes  01100110  01101111  01101111  and look up the ASCII character that corresponds to given number  For example  01100110 is 102 in decimal and the ASCII character with code 102 is f     perl -E  say 0b01100110  102   perl -E  say chr 102   f    See what the chr function does   You can generalize this algorithm and have a different number of bits per character and different encodings  the point remains the same

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Why not just do this take 010010001001001 split it into two bits 8 letter each  01001000  01001001   Then issue the powers  01001000        01001001    The first 8 ignore the first three they determine if it s capital or not  the go right to left doing powers of 2  2 1  2 2 2 3 2 4 2 5   So then add all the ones up   there s only one  and it   8  and te eight letter in the alphabet is h so our first bit is the letter h  try it on the other bit

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To read binary ASCII characters with great speed using only your head   Letters start with leading bits 01  Bit 3 is on  1  for lower case  off  0  for capitals  Scan the following bits 4   8 for the first that is on  and select the starting letter from the same index in this string     PHDBA     think P H D   Bachelors in Arts   E g  1xxxx   P  01xxx   H  etc  Then convert the remaining bits to an integer value  e g  010   2   and count that many letters up from your starting letter  E g  01001010    H 2   J

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http   www roubaixinteractive com PlayGround Binary Conversion The Characters asp it just looks here     not HERE but it has a table    There are 8 bits in a byte  One byte can be one symbol  One bit is either on or off

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Assuming that by  binary code  you mean just plain old data  sequences of bits  or bytes   and that by  letters  you mean characters  the answer is in two steps   But first  some background    A character is just a named symbol  like  LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A  or  GREEK SMALL LETTER PI  or  BLACK CHESS KNIGHT    Do not confuse a character  abstract symbol  with a glyph  a picture of a character   A character set is a particular set of characters  each of which is associated with a special number  called its codepoint   To see the codepoint mappings in the Unicode character set  see http   www unicode org Public UNIDATA UnicodeData txt    Okay now here are the two steps    The data  if it is textual  must be accompanied somehow by a character encoding  something like UTF-8  Latin-1  US-ASCII  etc   Each character encoding scheme specifies in great detail how  byte sequences are interpreted as codepoints  and conversely how codepoints are encoded as byte sequences   Once the byte sequences are interpreted as codepoints  you have your characters  because each character has a specific codepoint    A couple notes    In some encodings  certain byte sequences correspond to no codepoints at all  so you can have character decoding errors  In some character sets  there are codepoints that are unused  that is  they correspond to no character at all    In other words  not every byte sequence means something as text

[binary] How exactly does binary code get converted into letters?

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