Beginner's Guide to Coding and Data

Unveiling Text to Binary Conversion

Welcome everyone! In this lesson, we'll dive deeper into the world of text to binary conversion, understanding how JavaScript makes this magic possible. So, without further ado, let's get started.

Prerequisites

To fully grasp this lesson, it helps to have a foundational understanding of character encoding and positional numeral systems. Topics we'll cover include:

• Character codes
• Unicode mapping
• Converting to binary

As a reminder, character encoding is a system for representing characters in a digital format. In today's digital age, Unicode is often the go-to encoding method.

JavaScript Code Behind the Scene

With the background set, let's delve into the JavaScript code that turns text into binary. We'll explore two significant pieces of JavaScript code:

• charCodeAt()
• toString()

The charCodeAt() function helps us to obtain the Unicode character code, while toString() aids in the conversion from decimal to another base, such as binary.

// Converting the first character 'D' to Unicode
let unicodeValue = "D".charCodeAt(0);

// Converting the Unicode value to binary
let binaryValue = unicodeValue.toString(2);

Troubleshooting & Best Practices

During the coding process, we may run into some common issues. For instance, we can't simply type a number or character without specifying its type.

To let JavaScript know that we are working with a string, we use quotes. Similarly, for numbers, we can use the Number() function to specify the type.

// Correct way to specify a string
let char = "D";

// Correct way to specify a number
let num = Number(100);

If you're new to coding and find some of these examples intimidating, don't fret! Keep working and you'll get it!