Talk:Binary file

Binary Code

Wanna talk about binary and how uberley geeky it is? 010000110110000101101110001000000111100101101111011101010010000001110010011001010110000101100100001000000111010001101000011010010111001100111111

--Caleb09 02:39, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

0101100101100101011100110010000001001001001000000110001101100001011011100010000001101110011011110110111101100010

>_>

it's so obvious you used a converter. =D 24.125.162.186 00:31, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

01110111 01101000 01100101 01110010 01100101 00100000 01100011 01100001 01101110 00100000 01001001 00100000 01100110 01101001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01110011 01101111 01101101 01100101 00100000 01100110 01110010 01100101 01100101 00100000 01110000 01101111 01110010 01101110 00111111 88.107.15.236

I think that the first sentence of the first paragraph should be rephrased.

In ordinary usage they are typically contrasted with binary files, so that binary files are all files which do not contain merely plain text.

I believe this sentence could be simplified. This would allow less articulate readers to understand the sentence structure in a more timely fashion.

I believe the sentence be rephrased to "In many cases, plain text files are considered to be different from binary files because binary files are made up of more than just plain text."Trevbork 16:58, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

this statement is actually incorrect

In a binary computer system, pretty much all files are binary - to call a binary file not human readable is a bit bizarre too because humans can read the binary data - they just may not make sense of what it is supposed to convey without a program (or OS function) such as a binary to ASCII translator. "ZhuLien 16:58, 15 May 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 27.32.141.11 (talk)

Article needs an actual binary example

Hexadecimal representations are excellent for human (or at least geek) consumption. But since this is an article on binary, don't you think we should, you know, have an actual binary example? Both graphics show hex, not binary representations. Perhaps one showing hex and one binary would be better. N2e 02:29, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

What does data actually look like? Yes, you are right, hex digits are a representation of data, but so is anything else that you could possibly display on a computer screen. Data does not have any inherently visible shape or form. Even a string of '1' and '0' glyphs still is just a representation: It's not what the data actually looks like. 173.75.33.51 (talk) 19:37, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/173.75.33.51 189.191.220.22 (talk) 03:07, 9 February 2024 (UTC)

well i need help

how do i get a converter and get a hexidecimal chart

another question how do i make a binary file. i tried and failed. 68.54.237.203 (talk) 01:10, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Look at the hexadecimal charts at hexadecimal. As for making a binary file, it entirely depends on what the purpose of the file is. For example, native Microsoft Word .doc and .rtf files are binary files. Creating a binary file depends somewhat on what operating system environment you use. —EncMstr (talk) 01:28, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

merge

I suggest merging binary compatible, binary compatibility, and binary code compatibility into subsections of the binary file article. --DavidCary (talk) 14:12, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

Oppose - a "binary file" does not necessarily contain "binary code" in the sense of machine code or some virtual machine code for an interpreter. Binary code compatibility (to which binary compatibility redirects) discusses "binary compatibility" in the sense of "this machine running this version of this OS can run code for this other machine running this other OS or this other version of the same OS"; that page is the correct page for discussing that. The "Binary compatibility" section of this page (to which binary compatible currently links) discusses a notion of binary compatibility that includes more than just executable files - for example, a word processor or spreadsheet that has versions for, say, Windows, OS X, and pick-your-Linux-distribution-and-desktop-environment and for which the file format is the same in all versions is an example of that form of binary compatibility. The "executable code" flavor of binary compatibility is sufficiently specialized that it should be discussed in the context of executable code, not binary files in general. Guy Harris (talk) 19:16, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

None of this makes any sense to me as a layman

I find things far easier to understand if examples are given. To me binary is a mathematical thing (i.e. base 2). Talk of computer binary files totally confuses me. Can someone elaborate please? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.28.231.116 (talk) 2017-06-06T11:51:01‎

Can you be more specific what you were looking for, and what you found confusing? There already are a few examples (eight or so), so where were you expecting to see an example to help illustrate a concept? +mt 02:03, 6 June 2017 (UTC)

The page mentions, in passing, but not as explicit examples in a list of examples (older) Microsoft Word documents and GIFs. Perhaps it should also mention some other examples, such as other image formats, movie formats, other office-style documents such as Excel spreadsheets, and the executable image files for applications.

Yes, the name can be confusing - it's not that files are stored in "binary" vs. "text" format, all files on non-ancient computers are stored in "binary" format, given that the contents are, ultimately, a blob of bits, it's that if the file isn't text, it's "binary". Guy Harris (talk) 03:47, 6 June 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the replies. I suppose I just wanted a list showing some common binaries. But if a binary file is anything that isn't text, then a comprehensive list would be ridiculously long. I suppose what confuses me the most is why binary files are so called. Does anyone know how they got that name, as opposed to a much easier to understand term like "non-text files"? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.28.231.116 (talk) 22:59, 7 June 2017 (UTC)

So the question is: where does the name "binary file" come from. Essentially, it is called that because it is stored as a sequence of bits (i.e. zero or one), so "binary" indeed refers to something that is base-2. As mentioned above, every file on a digital computer is a binary file. Some of these can be better described as "text file" or whatever, if a character encoding or format is known or detected. As a short example, the human-readable text Hi can be encoded using the ASCII character encoding to get a binary file with 16 bits 0100100001101001. Binary files are meaningless blobs of bits without character encodings or other established conventions. +mt 05:25, 8 June 2017 (UTC)

Well, my original comment pointed out that the entire Wikipedia article was hard for me as a layman to understand. I often look stuff up on Wikipedia to understand something that I've read elsewhere, but in this instance the article left me none the wiser. (Same goes for the Webopedia entry for binary file). Perhaps a simpler (but not simplistic) section could be added to this article for laypersons with everything explained in plain English? And yes, I also (but not exclusively) would like to understand where the term "binary file" came from (to mean non-text files). Since, as you say, every file on a digital computer is a binary file, then why aren't text files referred to as binary files as well? I mean they're stored as ones and zeros, right? Can you see why I'm confused? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.28.231.116 (talk) 21:54, 8 June 2017 (UTC)