All language subtitles for 2_Character Encoding

By the end of this video,

you'll learn how we can
represent the words, numbers,

emojis, and more we see
on our screens from

only these 256 possible values.

It's all thanks to
character encoding.

Character encoding
is used to assign

our binary values to

characters so that we as
humans can read them.

We definitely
wouldn't want to see

all the texts in our emails in

webpages rendered in complex
sequences of zeros and ones.

This is where character
encodings come in handy.

You can think of character
encoding as a dictionary.

It's a way for your
computers to look up

which human character should be

represented by a
given binary value.

The oldest character encoding
standard used is ASCII.

It represents the
English alphabet,

digits, and punctuation marks.

The first character
in the ASCII to

binary table, a lowercase a,

maps to 01100001 in binary.

This is done for
all the characters

you can find in the
English alphabet,

as well as numbers and
some special symbols.

The great thing with ASCII was
that we only needed to use

127 values out of
our possible 256.

It lasted for a very long time,

but eventually,
it wasn't enough.

Other character
encoding standards were

created to represent
different languages,

different amounts of
characters, and more.

Eventually, they would require

more than 256 values we
are allowed to have.

Then came UTF-8,

the most prevalent encoding
standard used today.

Along with having the
same ASCII table,

it also lets us use a
variable number of bytes.

What do I mean by that?
Think of any emoji.

It's not possible
to make emojis with

a single byte since we can

only store one
character in a byte.

Instead, UTF-8 allows us to

store a character in
more than one byte,

which means endless emoji fun.

UTF-8 is built off
the Unicode Standard.

We won't go into much detail,

but the Unicode
Standard helps us

represent character encoding
in a consistent manner.

Now that we've been able to
represent letters, numbers,

punctuation marks,
and even emojis,

how do we represent color?

Well, there are all
kinds of color models.

For now, let's stick
to a basic one

that's used in a
lot of computers,

RGB or red, green,
and blue model.

Just like the actual colors,

if you mix a combination
of any of these,

you'll be able to get the
full range of colors.

In computer learn,

we use three characters
for the RGB model.

Each character represents
a shade of the color,

and that then changes the color

of the pixel you
see on your screen.

With just eight combinations
of zeros and ones,

we're able to
represent everything

that you see on
your computer from

a simple letter a
to the very video

that you're watching
right now. Very cool.