If you had microscope powerful enough to view the data stored on a computer's hard drive, or in its memory, you would see lots of 0s and 1s. Each such 0 and 1 is known as a bit. A bit is a unit of measurement, like a meter or a pound. Collections of computer data are measured in bits; every letter, image, and pixel you interact with on a computer is represented by bits.
We work with more complex data when we program, including numbers and strings. This section examines how such data is represented within a computer.
A byte is a set of 8 bits. Bytes look like 00101101 or 11110011, and they represent a binary number, or a base-2 number. A binary number is a number representation that uses only 0s and 1s. The numbers that you are used to, which are built out of the integers 0...9, are decimal numbers, or base-10 numbers.
Since each bit can have one of two values, each byte can have one of 28 = 256 different values.
It may not be obvious, but every decimal integer can be represented as a binary integer, and vice versa. There are 256 different values a byte may take, each of which can be used to represent a decimal integer, from 0 to 255.
Note
We will not go into binary to decimal number conversion. If you are interested in learning more, there are many tutorials online that can show you the way.
In this way, the bits in a computer can be viewed as integers. If you want to represent values greater than 255, just use more bits!
Strings are collections of characters, so if we can represent each character as a number, then we'll have a way to go from a string to a collection of bits, and back again.
Unlike the natural translation between binary and decimal numbers, there is no
natural translation between integers and characters. For example, you might
create a pairing of 0 to a, 1 to b, and so on. But what integer should
be paired with $ or a tab? Since there is no natural way to translate
between characters and integers, computer scientists have had to make such
translations up. Such translations are called character encodings.
There are many different encodings, some of which continue to evolve as our use of data evolves. For instance, the most recent versions of the Unicode character encoding include emoji characters, such as 🌮.
Most of the characters that you are used to using---including letters, numbers, whitespace, punctuation, and symbols---are part of the ASCII (pronounced ask-ee) character encoding. This standard has changed very little since the 1960s, and it is the foundation of all other commonly-used encodings.
Note
ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, but most programmers never remember that, so you shouldn't try to either.
ASCII provides a standard translation of the most commonly-used characters to one of the integers 0...127, which means each character can be stored in a computer using a single byte.
ASCII maps a to 97, b to 98, and so on for lowercase letters, with z mapping to 122. Uppercase letters map to the values 65 through 90. The other integers between 0 and 127 represent symbols, punctuation, and other assorted odd characters. This scheme is called the ASCII table, and rather than replicate it here, we refer you to an excellent one online.
In summary, strings are stored in a computer using the following process:
Fun Fact
JavaScript uses the UTF-16 encoding, which includes ASCII as a subset. We will rarely need anything outside of its ASCII subset, so we will usually talk about "ASCII codes" in JavaScript.
JavaScript provides methods to convert any character into its ASCII code and back.
The string method charCodeAt takes an index and returns the ASCII code of
the character at that index.
Example
1let nonprofit = "LaunchCode";
2
3console.log(nonprofit.charCodeAt(0));
4console.log(nonprofit.charCodeAt(1));
5console.log(nonprofit.charCodeAt(2));
6console.log(nonprofit.charCodeAt(3));
7console.log(nonprofit.charCodeAt(4));
8console.log(nonprofit.charCodeAt(5));
9console.log(nonprofit.charCodeAt(6));
10console.log(nonprofit.charCodeAt(7));
11console.log(nonprofit.charCodeAt(8));
12console.log(nonprofit.charCodeAt(9));
Console Output
76
97
117
110
99
104
67
111
100
101
To convert an ASCII code to an actual character, use String.fromCharCode().
Example
1let codes = [76, 97, 117, 110, 99, 104, 67, 111, 100, 101];
2
3let characters = String.fromCharCode(codes[0]) + String.fromCharCode(codes[1])
4 + String.fromCharCode(codes[2]) + String.fromCharCode(codes[3])
5 + String.fromCharCode(codes[4]) + String.fromCharCode(codes[5])
6 + String.fromCharCode(codes[6]) + String.fromCharCode(codes[7])
7 + String.fromCharCode(codes[8]) + String.fromCharCode(codes[9]);
8
9console.log(characters);
Console Output
LaunchCode