I’ve noticed some files I opened in a text editor have all kinds of crazy unrenderable chars

  • @AbouBenAdhem
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    26 hours ago

    Most binary-to-text encodings don’t attempt to make the text human-readable—they’re just intended to transmit the data over a text-only medium to a recipient who will decode it back to the original binary format.

    • @cheese_greaterOP
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      6 hours ago

      I do understand I’m not able to read it myself, I’m more curious about the architecture of how that data is represented and stored and conceptually how such representation is practically organized/reified…

      • @AbouBenAdhem
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        5 hours ago

        The original binary format is broken into six-bit chunks (e.g., 100101), which in decimal format correspond to the integers from 0 to 63. These are just mapped to letters in order:
        000000 (0) = A,
        000001 (1) = B,
        000010 (2) = C,
        etc.—it goes through the capital letters first, then lower-case letters, then digits, then “+” and “/”.

        It’s so simple you could do it by hand from the above description, if you were looking at the data in binary format.