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

def decodeIt():
    data = b"\xBC cup of flour"
    return data.decode("ISO-8859-1")

## Explanation
Characters with Unicode values (in hex) between A0 and FF have identical character mappings but, in fact, the encodings are different. ISO-8859-1 uses a single byte to represent each character in this range, whereas UTF-8 uses two bytes to represent each character in this range.

This lesson contains the solutions and explanations of the challenges in the lesson: Character and Text Solution.

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 Solution

Coding challenge 1 solution

Explanation