Character Encoding

📚 Introduction

In this video, you'll learn how we can represent the words, numbers, emojis, and more that we see on our screens using only 256 possible values. This is made possible through character encoding, which assigns binary values to characters for human readability.

🔤 Character Encoding: ASCII

Character encoding is like a dictionary that allows computers to map binary values to human characters. The oldest encoding standard used is ASCII, which represents the English alphabet, digits, and punctuation marks. ASCII uses 7 bits to encode characters, resulting in 128 possible values. The ASCII to binary table maps characters to their binary representations.

🌍 Character Encoding: Unicode and UTF-8

As the need for representing different languages and characters grew, other encoding standards were developed. The Unicode Standard provides a consistent representation for character encoding. UTF-8, the most prevalent encoding standard today, builds upon ASCII and allows variable-length encoding. It can represent characters using multiple bytes, which enables the use of emojis and a wider range of characters.

🎨 Color Representation: RGB Model

To represent colors on computers, the RGB (Red, Green, Blue) model is commonly used. Each color channel is represented by a character, and combining different intensities of red, green, and blue allows us to create a wide range of colors. With just eight combinations of zeros and ones, we can represent all the colors we see on our screens.

🌈 Conclusion

Through character encoding and color representation, we can effectively communicate and display a variety of content on our computers. From simple letters to complex videos, these encoding techniques enable us to interact with digital information in a meaningful and visually appealing way.