Explore how computer systems store, manipulate, and convert various data types like text, images, and videos through integrated software and hardware. Gain insights into accessible data representation.

Computer systems do not understand human instructions, nor can they perceive real-life data in its raw form. Therefore, computer systems require a way to store and represent information in an accessible way. They use software and hardware components combined to help retrieve information, store it, manipulate it, and convert it back to a human-accessible format. If you want to learn how computer systems perform complex tasks such as storing and manipulating textual data, videos, music, images of your cat, and much more, this course is meant for you.

Information Representation in Computer Systems

# Character representation
We talked about encoding characters with ASCII and Unicode in the lesson on number and letter representation. Now, let’s see these encoding methods in Python. An English letter can easily be represented using 1 byte. In the code snippet below, we are finding the length of a UTF-8 encoded character that has the value **A**. Run to verify that it is indeed 1 byte.

>**Note:** The function `encode` forces the use of a certain character encoding scheme like UTF-8.


In this you will learn how to represent characters and text in Python.

Computer basics

Hardware and Software Components of a Computer

Data Representation in Python

Image, Audio, and Video Representation in Python

Data Compression

Character and Text Representation

Character representation