Text Encoding

Text characters are represented by numbers in computers. Different encoding systems use different numbers for characters:

ASCII

The ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) encoding uses 7 bits to represent 128 characters, including English letters (both uppercase and lowercase), digits, and common punctuation symbols. Each ASCII character can be represented by a unique number between 0 and 127.

UTF-8

UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding that can represent every character in the Unicode standard. It uses 1 to 4 bytes per character. UTF-8 is backward compatible with ASCII, meaning that the first 128 UTF-8 characters are identical to ASCII.

Conversion Process

Converting text to octal involves the following steps:

1. Determine the numerical value of each character using the chosen encoding (ASCII or UTF-8).
2. Convert each numerical value to its octal (base-8) representation.
3. Optionally, separate each octal value with a space for readability.

Usage Notes

• When using ASCII encoding, any character outside the 7-bit ASCII range (128-255) will be converted to a question mark (?).
• UTF-8 encoding supports all Unicode characters, including special symbols, emojis, and characters from non-English languages.
• Each UTF-8 character may be represented by multiple octal values if it uses more than one byte.
• Octal values are often used in computing for file permissions and in some legacy systems.