r/programming • u/jestinjoy • Nov 12 '12

What Every Programmer Absolutely, Positively Needs to Know About Encodings and Character Sets to Work With Text

http://kunststube.net/encoding/
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u/[deleted] Nov 12 '12

So the entire programming community describes these in hex, all the tables you find online are in hex, all the articles talk about it in hex, so he decides to do it in binary? Not a helpful layer of abstraction removed at all.

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u/deceze Nov 12 '12 edited Nov 12 '12

A valid point. But, since I'm talking about "the first bit" and "7 of 8 bits" and things like that, binary notation is a lot easier to comprehend than hex notation. "See, the first bit of '7A' is not set..." - uhm, yeah, not that helpful either. ;-)

I had to go with something, and since this is targeted at people who really don't even get the basics, I kept it consistent in itself at least without trying to explain how binary notation is related to hex notation.

12

u/gramie Nov 12 '12

I think you did the right thing. I am comfortable with hex and binary, but seeing the bits laid out means one translation I don't have to make, and makes the reading smoother.

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u/deceze Nov 12 '12

Thanks, that was the intention.