

Every piece of hardware with a ethernet, bluetooth or wireless interface has this unique 48 bit number to identify it. You can express the numbers 0 and 1 with just 1 bit, or you can use 8 bits to express them as 0000000001, respectively.A MAC address also known as a media access control address is a unique 48 bit number identifier assigned to network interfaces. If its not clear why this is, think back to the decimal-to-binary table from above.


They traffic in units of 8 bits, conventionally known as a byte. The ASCII table that you saw above contains 128 code points and characters, 0 through 127 inclusive. Naively, this should take log(110) log(2) 6.781 bits, but theres no such thing as 0.781 bits. Say you need to store a character set of 110 characters total. Given a number of bits, n, the number of distinct possible values that can be represented in n bits is 2 n. Using the Python ord() function gives you the base-10 code point for a single str character. There are different ways of symbolically representing a bit that all mean the same thing.Įach character from the ASCII string gets pseudo-encoded into 8 bits, with spaces in between the 8-bit sequences that each represent a single character. If you dont see a character here, then you simply cant express it as printed text under the ASCII encoding scheme. The best way to start understanding what they are is to cover one of the simplest character encodings, ASCII.ĪSCII is a good place to start learning about character encoding because it is a small and contained encoding.Įach single character has a corresponding code point, which you can think of as just an integer.Ĭharacters are segmented into different ranges within the ASCII table. Specifically, all code examples in this tutorial were generated from a CPython 3.7.2 shell, although all minor versions of Python 3 should behave (mostly) the same in their treatment of text. Youll see how to use concepts of character encodings in live Python code. Convert Address To Bytes How To Use Concepts Youll still get a language-agnostic primer, but youll then dive into illustrations in Python, with text-heavy paragraphs kept to a minimum. Convert Address To Bytes How To Use Concepts.
