Back to basics: Character count and document size

It’s a lazy day today and I have decided to write about something as lazy. It’s not so lazy so to speak but a means to take the audience way back to the introduction of computers and the basic computations done. In this post I wish to explore the size of the document and how to determine the number of characters in it.

Back to class. We all know that (or maybe not)

1 byte = 1 characters=7bits

1MB = 1024 bytes

1GB = 1024 MB =1024bytes X 1024 bytes.

This is not the case especially with data providers as they follow the metric system where

1 mega something = 1 million somethings.

 

So I have  a document, its has a given number of characters and I want to ascertain the formulas given above. First of all the document will be typed into Microsoft word which will tell us the character count including the spaces within them. The diagram below shows that calculation.

We have 3621 characters. Now let’s try something different. I will copy all the text from the word document and paste it into notepad. I will soon explain why I have to use notepad.

 

As seen in the size value above the document is 3.54 KB or specifically 3632 bytes. From Microsoft word we had 3621 characters. Question here, where did the extra 11 characters come from? Anyway we have an deviation of 11 characters which translates to 0.3%; that’s acceptable.

All am trying to achieve here is do a quick refresher course on the data size calculation as it’s done on introduction of computers which sometimes not appreciated enough. We can easily tell the number of characters of characters in a document simply by looking at its size. We can also get an idea of how formatting affects the size. For instance adding styling to the word document will result in a larger document. This means that each formatting added to the document adds to the size of the document in memory and disk.

In the next post on the same series, I will explore how mobile phone and data providers steal from the customers simply because of the customers’ ignorance in the data size calculation.