Decoding Binary UTF-8 Signage in a Public Restroom Using Java

The article describes a binary message found on a public restroom sign written in Chinese, English, Japanese and Korean, and explains how the binary part likely represents UTF‑8 encoded Chinese characters.

It reviews UTF‑8 encoding principles, including byte patterns for 1‑4 byte characters, and shows how to identify the leading bits to determine character length.

By extracting the first 24 bits (starting with 1110) and removing the marker bits, the binary sequence 0101 010000 010001 is obtained, which corresponds to the Unicode code point 0x5411, the character “向”.

To automate the conversion of the full binary string, a Java program is provided that parses the bit string into bytes and prints the resulting Chinese text.

private static void toChinese() {
    String bits = "11100101100100001001000111100101100010011000110"
            + "1111001001011100010000000111001011011000010001111111001"
            + "10101011011010010100100000111001101001011010000111111001"
            + "10100110001000111011100100101110001000000011100101101001"
            + "0010100111111001101010110110100101";
    int length = bits.length();
    byte[] bytes = new byte[length >> 3];
    for (int i = 0; i < length; i += 8) {
        String byteString = bits.substring(i, i + 8);
        bytes[i >> 3] = (byte) Integer.parseInt(byteString, 2);
    }
    System.out.println("转换之后的结果：" + new String(bytes));
}