Learn How to Read Binary Code in Less Than 5 Minutes

By the end of this article you’re going to know how to read and write binary code. It is insanely easy and a cool piece of knowledge to teach your friends!

What is Binary?

• It’s an ON and OFF system of counting. 0s represent OFF and 1s represent ON. You can also think of it as Yes and No.
• Each digit in binary can have 2 values- making the base 2. (It’s okay if this doesn’t make sense- you will see how it is implemented below)

How Does It Work?

To the naked eye, all we see is 1s and 0s, but they actually translate into symbols (lowercase letters, uppercase letters, and different characters). How?

Let’s look at an example of an 8 digit binary number:

8 digit binary number

• We read binary code from right to left.
• Because it is a base 2 system, each digit is 2 to the power of n. n represents the placement of that number.
• The 1s and 0s are only telling us if we are using that value or not. 0s mean we are not using it and 1s mean we are. Reference the image below.

As you can see from the image above, each number has a yes or no value represented by either a red X or a green checkmark. We are only going to use the values of the green checkmarks to find out what symbol these 8 numbers represent!

So let’s do some quick math:

All we did here was take the values of the green checkmarks to get their number value- remember the green checkmarks represent the ON (or yes) values.

We then added up those numbers to get a total of 33.

Now we can take 33 and look it up in the American Standard Code for Information Interchange or ASCII chart for short. (When people say they want to write something in Binary what they mean is how to spell things with ASCII).

Take a look at the chart below and look for 33 under the decimal column. Then take a look at what value 33 represents under the ASCII column:

This Chart is from Alfred State

You did it!

Our 8 digit binary code example represents the exclamation point symbol: !

It is truly that easy!

Let’s try a harder example by making a word. This will be our first letter:

Finding ON and OFF values based on 0s and 1s

Calculating the ON values

Adding all ON values to get our decimal number then converting it into a letter using the ASCII table.

And this will be our second letter:

Finding ON and OFF values based on 0s and 1s

Calculating the ON values

Adding all ON values to get our decimal number then converting it into a letter using the ASCII table.

If we put it all together…

Binary code for “Woo!”

You should get the word “Woo!” as in Woo! You did it!!

I hope this helped you learn how to read and write binary code! Happy Coding :)

Stay Tuned! 💫

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