How do you spell letters in binary?

Question

On thinkgeek.com there are fuuny t-shirts that say stuff in binary. I know how to count in binary but how do you make letters in binary?

Answer 1

101 = lol

Answer 2

A letter in ascii format is stored as 8 bits, so it takes eight binary values to make a letter. There are other standards that use 16 or smaller values, but ascii uses 8 bits to include all upper and lowercase letters, numbers as a text value, and punctuation marks.
8 places means 256 possible characters.
You can find ascii to binary converters on google, I've got my wife's name in binary going around my arm lol, 12 letters, 96 1's and 0's.

Answer 3

When you say you know how to "uncode" numbers in binary, then compare that to letters, my guess is you know how to convert from base 2 to base 10. This actually has nothing to do with "uncoding" letters. Computers manipulate numbers. They don't have a natural way to represent letters, punctuation, or digits (digits as in the human representation of a number like "123" as opposed to a representation of the value of the same number, 123). There are many schemes to represent letters and other human-readable characters inside the computer. Basically all you need is for everyone to agree on a mapping to/from values from/to letters and other characters. It didn't take long before everyone programming computers figured out they all needed to agree on a standard mapping. ASCII is that mapping, at least for the English alphabet and related characters. Others have pointed you to ASCII charts on Wikipedia so I won't repeat that here. ASCII is nice but it's not sufficient to represent all the alphabets of all the languages in the world. As a result of the need to standardize ALL languages, Unicode was invented. ASCII represents 256 characters as values from 0 to 255. These values fit in 8 binary digits (bits). Unicode uses 16 bits and is able to represent every character in every language in the world. For compatibility with older programs, the first 256 Unicode values (0000000000000000 to 0000000011111111 in binary) are identical to ASCII. From there you get into other languages and special characters, with lots of room left over for alien languages or whatever we might need in the future. So again, all ASCII is is an agreement among programmers to represent letters and digits and punctuation using a particular mapping from characters to values. There's nothing special about it -- we could represent any letter with any value we all agreed on -- but it's the standard that has been adopted, so it's what we use.

Answer 4

The link below shows the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). It will show you the ASCII code for letters, numbers, and a number of non-printed characters.

You might also note that the ASCII representation for numbers is not the same as the binary representation for numbers. This is because ASCII is used mostly for printed data, or numbers stored in a textual format.

Answer 5

Man all these people aren't helpful

01101100 01100101 01110100 01110100 01100101 01110010 01110011

L= 01101100
E= 01100101
T= 01110100
T= 01110100
E= 01100101
R= 01110010
S= 01110011


haha. here's a great binary converter: http://www.sitinthecorner.com/binary/binary.php

Basically, every letter on the keyboard, along with symbols, has a code in binary. the letter A is 01100001, the letter B is 01000010, and so on.

Answer 6

ASCII is, of course, a correct answer, provided you have the luxury of an 8 bit time-synchronized word.

But don't forget about one of the first methods used on the very first Internet: Morse code. And dot and a dash is as good as a one and a zero, and you can convert it directly into alphanumerics if you're trained, without a computer.

Answer 7

Convert them from hex into bin
A = 41 hex = binary 0100 0001

Answer 8

Binary is a memory code, not a sentence translator. So you cant do it.

Answer 9

google "ascii code"

you might come across some hex values too.

Answer 10

wtf, i think you people are crazy!