Encoding System that Assign Same Number of Bits for Each Character

Question

I am trying to get a binary string that has been converted from text of a text file, I am able to get that but the problem is, I need each character to be represented by same number of bits, but that is not what I get (please see the below python code and corresponding output). For example, character i is represented by 1101001, which is 7 bits long, but character ! is represented by 100001, which is 6 bits long.

Is there any encoding/decoding system where each character takes same amount of bits?

content = open('a.txt', 'r').read()
test_str = content
# using join() + ord() + format()  ... Converting String to binary 

Binary = ' '.join(format(ord(i), 'b') for i in test_str)

#Decimal=int(Binary, 2)



# printing original string  
print("The original string is : " + str(test_str)) 
# printing result  
print("The string after Binary conversion : \n" + str(Binary))

Output:

The original string is : Hi! Is there a solution?
The string after Binary conversion : 
1001000 1101001 100001 100000 1001001 1110011 100000 1110100 1101000 1100101 1110010 1100101 100000 1100001 100000 1110011 1101111 1101100 1110101 1110100 1101001 1101111 1101110 111111

Answer 1

The usual way to solve this problem is by adding leading zeroes. So i would still be represented by 1101001, while ! will be represented by 0100001.

This is similar to how you digital clock might use 06:40 for 6:40, or 12:05 for 12:5.