What are hexadecimal characters?
Hexademical is base 16, and uses the letters A-F to represent the numerals 10-15, as has already been said. Computers work in 0s and 1, which however are very difficult to follow even for geeks. So hexadecimal is useful shorthand, given that the basic unit of storage is the byte, or sequence of 8 bits. For example, take a byte containing 11010101. This can be broken down into two ‘nibbles’, 1101 and 0101. Each nibble can contain a maximum value of 1111, or 15 in decimal. 1101 = (1 x 8) + (1 x 4) + (0 x 2) + (1 x 1) = 13. 0101 = (0 x 8) + (1 x 4) + (0 x 2) + (1 x 1) = 5 D is the hexadecimal character for 13, So the hexadecimal shorthand for this byte is D5.
