[Tutor] binary, ascii, steganography

[jaco erasmus]

Hi there, list
The other day I got bored at work and decided to give this programming thing
a try, since Rick Romero said it's becoming all the rage these days.
Eventually, I want to end up writing a steganography program, but for now I
am still an idiot playing around with text files, substituting letters in a
text file with letters from my secret message.  Not really all that
impressive, but you've got to start somewhere, right?
Here's where I become a tech idiot:
Eventually, I want to hide messages in photos by changing the value of
pixels in the photos, and then compare the two to each other.  The I suppose
I'll take the resulting 1's and 0's and, somehow, change them into binary or
something so that I can eventually magically make them letters.  How do I do
that?
Baby steps, first, though.  For the moment, I just want to compare 2 text
files, have similar letters give me 0 and different letters give me 1.  I
want to take those and turn them into letters.  How would I do that?
Thanks in advance.
Jakes
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