RESULTS
| 1 | What is Octal |
| 2 | How to convert |
| 3 | Why is it needed? |
| 4 | Disadvantages of octal system |
If you need to convert your content from hexadecimal format to octal format, you’ve stopped by at the right place. Our hexadecimal to octal converter does the job for you for free and quickly.
Hexadecimal to Octal conversion is a no-brainer. It’s just the simple conversion of code in hexadecimal format, to octal format, mostly for computing processes.
What is Hexadecimal
Hexadecimal or simply, hex is a base-16 numeral system (it uses 16 symbols to represent data unlike the decimal system, which uses 10). As there are no digits individually representing powers greater than 9, hex system uses 0 to 9 from digits and alphabets A to F for the rest of the base.
A single hex symbol can represent four bits of data or in other words, a single hex digit can represent one nibble of computer data (two nibbles = 1 byte)
What is Octal
As the name might have hinted, the octal numeral system is a base-8 system that uses 8 digits (0-7) to represent information. It requires 3 bits to represent the value of any digit.
The position of each number has a weight which is a power of 8. Each position in the Octal numeral system is eight times more significant than the preceding one.
How to convert
You can convert hex to number (octal) very easily with our converter. All you have to do is input the hex value in the bar and press ‘convert’ and that’s it.
Let us demonstrate the process with an example.
Consider that you have value ‘31e9f’ in hex format and you want it converted in octal format.
We do this using our calculator. We input the given value and press ‘convert’ and it converts our value in an octal format that is shown below:
\(‘617237’\)
Why is it needed?
As boring as it may sound, the conversion has quite a number of uses, especially by computer engineers, computer scientists and programmers.
- The primary benefit of using Octal numbers is that it employs less digits than decimal and hex system. So, it requires lesser number of computations and produces far less computational errors.
- It makes use of only 3 bits to represent any digit in binary and converting octal to binary and vice versa is a walk in the park.
- It is much easier to handle input and output in the octal format.
Disadvantages of octal system
The only main disadvantage of octal system is that computers can only process information in binary format. So, everything is first converted to binary to be processed through the built-in ASCII system in computers.
However, if you are a computer engineer who wants to test the computing hardware for processing but have the data in octal format, you can use our octal to binary converter to convert the data directly into binary code for direct information processing.