Context

Learn that characters are just numbers with agreed meanings. That agreement is called an encoding.

Starting hypothesis

• ASCII
• Unicode
• UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32
• How emoji is encoded
• And what causes weird gibberish characters

Method / Used Tools

ASCII

Saving Text with Bits

Digital computers fundamentally operate using binary values (0 and 1). This means that any type of information—including human-readable text—must ultimately be represented as sequences of bits. When a computer stores or processes a word like TryHackMe, it does not store the characters themselves; instead, it stores binary patterns that correspond to each character.

For this system to work across different machines and software, there must be a shared agreement about which binary sequence corresponds to which character. For example, if every system agrees that the letter T corresponds to the binary sequence 01010100, then:

• When storing the letter T, the computer writes 01010100 to memory or disk.
• When reading 01010100, the system displays the character T.

This mapping must exist for every possible character used in text, including:

• alphabetic characters (A–Z, a–z)
• digits (0–9)
• punctuation symbols