Conceptual Aside: Binary Data, Character Sets, and Encodings

Big Word

Binary Data: Data stored in binary (sets of 1s AND 0s).

The core of the math that computers are based on.

Each one or zero is called a 'bit' or 'binary digit'.

Character Set: A representation of characters as numbers

Each character gets a number. Unicode and ASCII are character sets.

Character Encoding: How characters are stored in binary

The numbers (or code pints) are converted and stored in binary.