What exactly causes binary file “gibberish”?

Question

I haven\'t found an answer to this particular question; perhaps there isn\'t one. But I\'ve been wondering for a while about it.

What exactly causes a binary file to

Answer 1

The reason files that are binary display as gibberish when viewed in standard text editors such as notepad is because when displayed with the encodings commonly used by these types of applications (e.g. ASCII of UTF-8) the data is mapped to characters when it is encoded for display, the output of this process generally makes as little sense to humans as the binary data being mapped, ergo the gibberish you see

As previously mentioned these files make more sense when viewed in a different way such as with a hex editor.

Certain file types can be recognized by data present in all files of a given type, for example all executable files (*.exe) begin with the letters MZ