Text to binary, and back.
Type text for its binary code, or paste binary to read it. Everything is UTF-8, so accents and emoji work too. Switch to hex, decimal or octal bytes.
Binary alphabet
ASCII letters, digits and punctuation as 8-bit binary, with their decimal value.
How text becomes binary
Computers store text as numbers. Each character has a code point in Unicode (A is 65, é is 233, 😀 is 128,512), and UTF-8 turns that code point into one to four bytes. A byte is eight bits, each 0 or 1, so a byte can hold any value from 0 (00000000) to 255 (11111111).
- Plain English text uses one byte per character, the same values as the original ASCII standard.
- Accented letters such as é and ñ use two bytes.
- Most symbols such as € and → use three bytes; emoji use four.
Reading binary back works the other way: group the bits in eights, turn each group into a number, and decode the bytes as UTF-8. If bytes do not form valid UTF-8, for example if a group was dropped, the translator shows � in their place. To look up any single character's code point and bytes, use the Unicode lookup.
Frequently asked questions
How do you convert text to binary? +
Each character is turned into one or more bytes using UTF-8, and each byte is written as eight binary digits. The letter A is byte 65, which is 01000001 in binary. Letters, digits and basic punctuation take one byte; accented letters take two and most emoji take four.
How do I read binary as text? +
Split the binary into groups of eight digits, convert each group to a number from 0 to 255, then decode the bytes as UTF-8. Paste binary into the right-hand box and the translator does this for you; it accepts groups separated by spaces or one continuous run of digits.
What is "hello" in binary? +
"hello" is 01101000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111: h, e, l, l and o, one byte each.
Why does an emoji become so many bytes? +
UTF-8 uses one byte for the 128 ASCII characters and two to four bytes for everything else. 😀 is code point U+1F600, which needs four bytes: 11110000 10011111 10011000 10000000.
What are hex, decimal and octal? +
They are other ways to write the same byte values. Hexadecimal (base 16) writes each byte as two digits from 00 to FF, decimal writes it as 0 to 255, and octal (base 8) as 000 to 377. Hex is the usual choice in programming because it is compact and lines up neatly with binary.