DATA REPRESENTATION

CONTENT – REVIEW
Number systems are the technique to represent numbers in the computer system
architecture, every value that you are saving or getting into/from computer memory has a
defined number system.
Computer architecture supports following number systems.
 1. Binary number system
2. Octal number system
3. Decimal number system
4. Hexadecimal (hex) number system

BINARY NUMBER SYSTEM

A Binary number system has only two digits that are 0 and 1. Every number (value)
represents with 0 and 1 in this number system. The base of binary number system is 2,
because it has only two digits.

OCTAL NUMBER SYSTEM

Octal number system has only eight (8) digits from 0 to 7. Every number (value)
represents with 0,1,2,3,4,5,6 and 7 in this number system. The base of octal number
system is 8, because it has only 8 digits.

DECIMAL NUMBER SYSTEM

Decimal number system has only ten (10) digits from 0 to 9. Every number (value)
represents with 0,1,2,3,4,5,6, 7,8 and 9 in this number system. The base of decimal
number system is 10, because it has only 10 digits.

HEXADECIMAL NUMBER SYSTEM

A Hexadecimal number system has sixteen (16) alphanumeric values from 0 to 9 and A to
F. Every number (value) represents with 0,1,2,3,4,5,6, 7,8,9,A,B,C,D,E and F in this
number system. The base of hexadecimal number system is 16, because it has 16
alphanumeric values. Here A is 10, B is 11, C is 12, D is 14, E is 15 and F is 16.

Number system Base(Radix) Used digits Example

Binary 2 0,1 (11110000)2

Octal 8 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7 (360)8

Decimal 10 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 (240)10

Hexadecimal 16 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9, (F0)16

A,B,C,D,E,F
CONVERSIONS

DECIMAL TO OTHER
1. DECIMAL TO BINARY
Decimal Number System to Other Base
To convert Number system from Decimal Number System to Any Other Base is quite
easy; you have to follow just two steps:
A) Divide the Number (Decimal Number) by the base of target base system (in which you
want to convert the number: Binary (2), octal (8) and Hexadecimal (16)).
B) Write the remainder from step 1 as a Least Signification Bit (LSB) to Step last as a
Most Significant Bit (MSB).

Decimal to Binary Result

Conversion

Decimal Number is :
(12345)10

Binary Number is

(11000000111001)2
2. DECIMAL TO OCTAL
Decimal to Octal Conversion Result

Decimal Number is : (12345)10

Octal Number is

(30071)8

3. DECIMAL TO HEXADECIMAL
Decimal to Hexadecimal Result
Conversion

Example 1

Decimal Number is : (12345)10

Hexadecimal Number is (3039)16

Example 2
Hexadecimal Number is
Decimal Number is : (725)10 (2D5)16

Convert

10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15

to its equivalent... A, B, C, D, E,
F
BINARY TO OTHER
A) Multiply the digit with 2(with place value exponent). Eventually add all the multiplication
becomes the Decimal number.
1. BINARY TO DECIMAL

2. BINARY TO OCTAL

An easy way to convert from binary to octal is to group binary digits into sets of three,
starting with the least significant (rightmost) digits.
Binary: 11100101 11 100 101
=

011 100 101 Pad the most significant digits with

zeros if necessary to complete a group
of three.

Then, look up each group in a table:

Binary: 000 001 010 011 100 101 110 111

Octal: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Binary = 011 100 101

Octal = 3 4 5 = 345 oct

3. BINARY TO HEXADECIMAL
An equally easy way to convert from binary to hexadecimal is to group binary digits into
sets of four, starting with the least significant (rightmost) digits.
 Binary: 11100101 = 1110 0101

Then, look up each group in a table:

Binary: 0000 0001 0010 0011 010 0101 0110 011

0 1

Hexadecimal: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Binary: 100 100 101 101 110 110 1110 111

0 1 0 1 0 1 1

Hexadecim 8 9 A B C D E F
al:

Binary = 1110 0101

Hexadecimal = E 5 = E5 hex

OCTAL TO OTHER

1. OCTAL TO BINARY
Converting from octal to binary is as easy as converting from binary to octal. Simply look
up each octal digit to obtain the equivalent group of three binary digits.
Octal: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Binary: 000 001 010 011 100 101 110 111

 Octal = 3 4 5

Binary = 011 100 101 = 011100101 binary

2. OCTAL TO HEXADECIMAL
When converting from octal to hexadecimal, it is often easier to first convert the octal
number into binary and then from binary into hexadecimal. For example, to convert 345
octal into hex:

(from the previous example)

Octal = 3 4 5

Binary = 011 100 101 = 011100101 binary

Drop any leading zeros or pad with leading zeros to get groups of four binary digits (bits):
Binary 011100101 = 1110 0101
Then, look up the groups in a table to convert to hexadecimal digits.
Binary: 0000 0001 0010 0011 0100 0101 011 0111
0

Hexadecimal: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Binary: 1000 1001 1010 1011 1100 1101 1110 1111

Hexadecimal 8 9 A B C D E F
:

Binary = 1110 0101

 Hexadecimal = E 5 = E5 hex

Therefore, through a two-step conversion process, octal 345 equals binary 011100101
equals hexadecimal E5.

3. OCTAL TO DECIMAL
The conversion can also be performed in the conventional mathematical way, by showing
each digit place as an increasing power of 8.

345 octal = (3 * 82) + (4 * 81) + (5 * 80) = (3 * 64) + (4 * 8) + (5 * 1) = 229 decimal

HEXADECIMAL TO OTHER
1. HEXADECIMAL TO BINARY
Converting from hexadecimal to binary is as easy as converting from binary to
hexadecimal. Simply look up each hexadecimal digit to obtain the equivalent group of
four binary digits.
Hexadecimal: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Binary: 0000 0001 0010 0011 0100 0101 0110 0111

Hexadecimal: 8 9 A B C D E F

Binary: 1000 1001 1010 1011 1100 1101 1110 1111

Hexadecimal A 2 D E

Binary = 1010 0010 1101 1110 10100010110

binary

2. HEXADECIMAL TO DECIMAL
Convert 42A.1216 into a decimal
number. Solution-
The hexadecimal number given is 4 2 A. 1 2
Positional weights 2 1 0 -1-2
The positional weights for each of the digits are written in italics below each digit.
Hence the decimal equivalent number is given as:
4 × 162+ 2 ×161 + 10 × 161 + 1 × 16−1 + 1 × 16−2
= 1024 + 32 + 10 + 0.0625 + 0.00390625
= (1066.06640625)10

3. HEXADECIMAL TO OCTAL

Given hexadecimal number is A 7 2 E

Binary equivalent is 1010 0111 0010 1110 = 1010011100101110
Forming groups of 3 bits from the LSB 001 010 011 100 101 110
Octal equivalent 1 2 3 4 5 6
Hence the octal equivalent of (𝐴72𝐸)16 is (123456)8 .

ENCODING SCHEMES

American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII)

In the early 1960s, computers had no way of communicating with each other due to
different ways of representing keys of the keyboard. Hence, the need for a common
standard was realised to overcome this shortcoming. Thus, encoding scheme ASCII was
developed for standardising the character representation. ASCII is still the most commonly
used coding scheme.

Initially ASCII used 7 bits to represent characters. Recall that there are only binary digits (0
or 1). Therefore, total number of different characters on the English keyboard that can be
encoded by 7-bit ASCII code is 27 = 128. Following Table shows
some printable characters for ASCII code. But ASCII is able to
encode character set of English language only.

Indian Script Code for Information Interchange (ISCII)

In order to facilitate the use of Indian languages on computers, a

common standard for coding Indian scripts called ISCII was
developed in India during mid 1980s.

It is an 8-bit code representation for Indian languages which means it

can represent 28=256 characters. It retains all 128 ASCII codes and
uses rest of the codes (128) for additional Indian language character
set. Additional codes have been assigned in the upper region (160–
255) for the ‘aksharas’ of the language.

UNICODE

There were many encoding schemes, for character sets of different

languages. But they were not able to communicate with each other, as
each of them represented characters in their own ways. Hence, text
created using one encoding scheme was not recognised by another
machine using different encoding scheme.

Therefore, a standard called UNICODE has been developed to

incorporate all the characters of every written language of the world.
UNICODE provides a unique number for every character, irrespective
of device (server, desktop, mobile), operating system (Linux,
Windows, iOS) or software application (different browsers, text
editors, etc.). Commonly used UNICODE encodings are UTF-8,
UTF-16 and UTF-32. It is a superset of ASCII, and the values 0–128
have the same character as in ASCII. Unicode characters for
Devanagari script