Text and numbers can be encoded in a computer as patterns of binary digits. Hexadecimal is a shortcut for representing binary. ASCII and Unicode are important character sets that are used as standard.
Hexadecimal (or hex) is a base 16 system used to simplify how binary is represented. A hex digit can be any of the following 16 digits: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F.
Each hex digit reflects a 4-bit binary sequence.
This table shows each hex digit with the equivalent values in binary and denary.
| Denary | Binary | Hexadecimal |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 0000 | 0 |
| 1 | 0001 | 1 |
| 2 | 0010 | 2 |
| 3 | 0011 | 3 |
| 4 | 0100 | 4 |
| 5 | 0101 | 5 |
| 6 | 0110 | 6 |
| 7 | 0111 | 7 |
| 8 | 1000 | 8 |
| 9 | 1001 | 9 |
| 10 | 1010 | A |
| 11 | 1011 | B |
| 12 | 1100 | C |
| 13 | 1101 | D |
| 14 | 1110 | E |
| 15 | 1111 | F |
This means an 8-bit binary number can be written using only two different hex digits - one hex digit for each nibble (or group of 4-bits). It is much easier to write numbers as hex than to write them as binary numbers.
For example: