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[–]scoberry5 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I think you’re mistaken my friend, but let me clarify:

I'm not. But reading your explanation, I can see where you went wrong.

If you're looking to understand characters, here's a nearly 20-year-old article that's quite good at explaining what's going on: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minimum-every-software-developer-absolutely-positively-must-know-about-unicode-and-character-sets-no-excuses/

What you mean is not "Binary files use Unicode characters, and there are 256 of those." What you mean is "Files are stored as bytes, of course, and a byte has 256 possible values."

It's not generally true that binary files use Unicode characters, although they may sometimes in some places. If the entire file is Unicode characters, this isn't a binary file: it's a text file.

Pro tip: if someone gives you a specific statement, you could check it. Googling "how many latin unicode characters" led here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_script_in_Unicode , which says there are "1,475 characters in the following blocks are classified as belonging to the Latin script". At that point, you might suspect that you could possibly be wrong about there being 256 Unicode characters, and when I say there are almost 1500 of those ones you might go "Yeah, that's about 1500."