Bits of Characters

If you are curious what the binary of an ascii/utf-8 char is you can use this string of commands at the command line:

echo 'A' | xxd -b

The A character is 65 in ascii which is 64 + 1. 01000000 is 64. 00000001 is of course 1, 01000001 is 65.

echo 'a' | xxd -b

The a character is 97 in ascii which is 64 + 32 + 1. 00100000 is 32 in binary, given this and the above, 01100001 is 97.

echo '🤓' | xxd -b

This ridiculous emoji is a utf-8 char. When you look at the binary for it:

11110000 10011111 10100100 10010011

You can see that every byte begins with a 1 which means that it will combine with any subsequent byte beginning with 1 to form a unique character.

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