Like the binary form of the integer '2' is '10',

How should I find out the binary form of a string say "abcd" ?

Kindly guide !

In which language? If you need to do a conversion in shell scripts, you may try bc by changing the base of the result, for example:
Edit: sorry, you want to convert a string of alphabetic characters to binary, don't you? The advice from dracuss (below) could be a starting point.

Every character is simply a number. for example A=65, B=66, C=67 and so on (look here http://www.asciitable.com/ ) and afterwards just transform the decimal number to binary.

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Thanks for replying !

I had guessed so, but was not sure..

Thanks again

Hey,

I guess you mean programmatically?

First of all, you need to know the representation of the string "abcd" in the sense of how is the character 'a' (or whichever) stored on the disk or in memory. Once you know the numeric representation of the character (say 'a' is number 97 in ASCII), you could then convert this decimal number to a binary number. For Unicode encodings other than UTF-8, you need to also check the endianess of your system.

Regarding programatically converting a decimal number to a binary number and print this number out on the screen, please search the web. There you'll find a _lot_ of algorithms :-)

Hope that helps,
Andi

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colucix

Thanks for bothering !

The language is C. I don't know any kind of shell scripts. Besides I did not think that mentioning the language would be necessary as formulas do not depend on languages.

Thanks Andi,

Your explanation was helpful

would using od or hexedit be cheating ?

Actually i need to do the conversions inside my C program therefore i can't use any of the tools mentioned.

Thanks for bothering.

^ can you look at the source code of those and use some of the code ?

also there is an atoi function that mite help.

I can look at the source code but I'll have to first locate the source code. Any Idea where its source code is ?

Thanks !

atoi() converts a string containing a number to and integer. For example, it converts the string "35" to the integer 35.

To print the actual character codes of each character in a string:

Actually, a computer doesn't even have a concept of letters! It's only the display part that does. When it recieves a number, it looks up the font glyph associated with that number, and displays it.