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?

4 Answers

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:

0... 

and etc.

Hope it helps!

0b is the Python prefix for the representation of binary numbers.

For example:

>>> bin(1024) # Convert an integer number to a binary string '0b10000000000' 

The "0b" is a prefix to denote that the number is in binary. A similar thing is done in hexadecimal where numbers start with "0x".

It also took me alot of time to figure this out, it's so simple, so for base 2 numbers like 0b01100010 (which is 98 base 10 written in base 2) the '0b' at the begining of the number is just to signify that it's a binary number.

Same case for 0x62 (is just 98 written in hexadecimal) the '0x' at the beining is just to identify the number as hexadecimal.

This is important this way, 98 != 0x98.