Text to Binary Converter

How to convert text to binary

1. Type or paste text in the Text box. Each character is converted to its UTF-8 bytes and shown as 8-bit binary, for example H becomes 01001000.
2. Switch the format to hexadecimal, octal or decimal byte values, and choose a separator or a 0x/0b prefix.
3. To decode, type or paste binary, hex, octal or decimal values in the other box. Spaces, commas and new lines are all accepted, and unbroken strings like 0100100001101001 are split into bytes automatically.

How text becomes bits

Computers store text as numbers. The ASCII standard assigns 0–127 to English letters, digits and punctuation: A is 65 (01000001), a is 97 and a space is 32. UTF-8, the encoding used by almost all of the web, keeps those values and uses two to four bytes for everything else, so é is 11000011 10101001 and an emoji takes four bytes. That is why the byte count can be larger than the character count.

Hexadecimal is a compact way to write the same bytes, two hex digits per byte, and is what you see in hex editors, network captures, colour codes and escape sequences such as \x48. Octal is mostly seen in older Unix tools, and decimal byte lists in languages such as C and Python.

This converter is useful for computer science homework, puzzles and escape rooms, debugging encoding problems (mojibake such as é) and preparing test data. It runs entirely in your browser.