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

  • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
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    53 minutes ago

    The original binary format is split 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:

    1. 000000 = A,
    2. 000001 = B,
    3. 000010 = 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.