0️⃣ How Text Becomes 0s and 1s

What a bit is, and how text turns into bits.

All data inside a computer ultimately comes down to 0s and 1s — bits. Text is no exception. Here's exactly how that works.

Why specifically 0 and 1

A computer's physical storage is built to reliably distinguish just two states: an electrical signal present (1) or absent (0). Binary is the system for representing all information using only those two states.

From bits to bytes

A group of 8 bits makes a byte, and 8 bits can represent 256 distinct values, from 0 to 255. In UTF-8, a single character is stored as 1 to 4 of these bytes.

The full path from text to bits

Character → Unicode code point (a unique number) → UTF-8 encoding (turning that code point into 1–4 bytes) → each byte written as 8 binary digits. Through these four steps, the letters you see on screen end up, inside storage, as a string of 0s and 1s.

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