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I am learning Computer Architecture from Introduction to Computing Systems (2nd Edition) and am stuck on this question.

What operations can be used to convert the binary representation of 3 into ASCII representation for 3? What about binary 4 to ASCII or any other digit?

The concepts I have learnt until now are Basic Logic gates and Bit Masking so I have to use them for conversion. Can someone help me understand what my approach should be?

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1 Answer 1

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By looking at a ASCII table you can see that the $4$ least significant bits of all characters between $0$ and $9$ correspond to the respective integer representations of the numbers between $0$ and $9$, while the 4 most significant bits are always $0011$ (leading zeroes are not shown in the table, so keep in mind you need to pad binary numbers to 8 bits).

If $x$ is the binary representation of a number between $0$ and $9$, you can then obtain the ASCII representation of the corresponding character as $$ x \;| \;00110000, $$

where $|$ denotes a bitwise logical or and the second operand is in binary.

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  • $\begingroup$ Thank you so much, I understood this. The ASCII representation of the numbers was in seven bits and the mask was six bits. So in order to avoid confusion, I converted both to 8 bits. Can you please edit your answer so that another student who sees the answer doesn't get confused? $\endgroup$
    – Ray
    May 31, 2020 at 0:50
  • $\begingroup$ I clarified my answer :) $\endgroup$
    – Steven
    May 31, 2020 at 2:10
  • $\begingroup$ Thank you so much! $\endgroup$
    – Ray
    May 31, 2020 at 3:49

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