pythonbinary

What does the "0b" mean at the begining of the byte 0b1100010?

As part of a small Python project I'm working on, I needed to convert text to a binary string. To accomplish this I used

list(map(bin, bytearray(message, 'utf8')))

The result was 0b1100010 and I get the 1100010 part, but what does the 0b part mean?

Solution

  • This is how Python tells you what base the number is:

    Base 2 looks like this:

    0b111010

    Base 16 looks like this:

    0x...

    Base 8 looks like this:

    0o...

    (also 0... in Python 2)