Binary alphabet

Look down the chart and every capital starts 010, and every lowercase letter starts 011. The last five bits count through the alphabet: A is 00001, B is 00010, and Z is 11010, which is 26. That's the whole trick.

So you can read a letter without the chart. Drop the first three bits, turn the last five into a number, and count that far into the alphabet. 01001000 ends 01000, which is 8, and the eighth letter is H.

Capital and lowercase differ in a single bit, the third from the left. That one bit is worth 32, which is why a and A are 32 apart in the ASCII table. Flip it and the case changes.

Each letter's binary is its ASCII code written in base 2. A is 65, which is 64 + 1, so its binary has a 1 in the 64s place and a 1 in the 1s place: 01000001. The binary to decimal converter shows the working for any of them.

Eight bits make a byte, so each letter here takes one byte. Letters outside English, and emoji, take more than one byte in UTF-8, and the translator above shows every byte.

A capital A starts 010 and ends 00001, the first letter: 01000001. A lowercase d starts 011 and ends 00100, which is 4: 01100100. A lowercase a is 011 then 00001: 01100001. So Ada in binary is 01000001 01100100 01100001.

Going the other way, 01001000 01101001 00100001 reads as H (010, then 8), i (011, then 9), and 00100001, which starts 001 and so isn't a letter at all: it's the exclamation mark from the table below. Hi!