01Text to Binary

About this binary translator

Convert text into binary — or hexadecimal, octal or decimal — and convert any of them back into text. Everything happens as you type, and the table underneath shows what happened character by character, including the Unicode code point and how many bytes each character took.

Decoding is forgiving: spaced bytes, unspaced runs of eight bits, comma-separated values and mixed whitespace are all accepted.

Why 'A' is 01000001

Computers store text as numbers, and a character encoding is the agreed table linking the two. In ASCII, capital A is 65, which in binary is 01000001. Lower-case a is 97, or 01100001 — exactly 32 more, which is why flipping one bit changes the case of a letter.

Eight bits make a byte, so ASCII characters are conventionally written as eight binary digits with a leading zero. That leading zero is not decoration: it is what marks the character as a single-byte one in UTF-8.

Emoji, accents and UTF-8

ASCII only covers 128 characters, which is not enough for é, ж, 漢 or 🎉. UTF-8 solves this by using more bytes for characters beyond ASCII: one byte for the ASCII range, two for most European accented letters, three for most of the world's scripts, and four for emoji and rare characters.

That is why 🎉 shows as four bytes in the table above rather than one. This converter works on UTF-8 bytes throughout, so anything you can type survives the round trip intact. To move binary data around as text instead, Base64 is the usual tool; to inspect a single character, the number base converter shows its code point directly.

Frequently asked questions