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.

Answer 1

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:

1. 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).

2. 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.