How to use the text to binary converter
- 1Type or paste your text into the Text box. The binary appears in the Binary box as you type.
- 2Choose Encoding: UTF-8 handles every character, including emoji; ASCII limits you to the 128 basic characters and allows 7-bit output.
- 3Pick a Separator (space, none, comma or new line) to match where you are pasting the result.
- 4Check the Character-by-character breakdown to see each character's code point, decimal, hex and binary bytes, then press Copy or Download.
- 5To go the other way, switch Direction to Binary → Text; the current binary moves into the input box.
Example
Hi!
01001000 01101001 00100001
H is 72, i is 105 and ! is 33. Each is written as an 8-bit byte. “Café 👍” needs 10 bytes: é takes two and the emoji takes four.
How text becomes binary
Computers store each character as a number, and each number as a pattern of bits. The converter does two lookups:
- Character → number. Unicode assigns every character a code point. Capital H is 72, lower-case i is 105.
- Number → bits. The number is written in base 2 and padded to a full byte: 72 = 64 + 8 =
01001000.
So “Hi” becomes 01001000 01101001. A byte has eight bits, which can hold values 0 to 255. One letter of English text is one byte, which answers the common question of how many bits one letter takes: eight.
ASCII vs UTF-8
ASCII (1963) defines 128 characters: English letters, digits, punctuation and control codes, numbered 0–127. Seven bits are enough for that range, so some textbooks write ASCII as 7-bit groups (H = 1001000).
UTF-8 (RFC 3629) is how almost all text on the web is stored today. It keeps the 128 ASCII characters as single bytes, identical to ASCII, and uses more bytes for everything else:
| Characters | Bytes | Example |
|---|---|---|
| ASCII (U+0000–U+007F) | 1 | A = 01000001 |
| Accented Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic | 2 | é = 11000011 10101001 |
| Most other scripts (Chinese, Hindi, Thai) | 3 | 中 = 3 bytes |
| Emoji and rare characters | 4 | 👍 = 11110000 10011111 10010001 10001101 |
That is why emoji take more than 8 bits: their code points are above 65,535 and UTF-8 needs four bytes to carry them.
Character-by-character breakdown
Below the result, a table lists each character with its Unicode code point (U+0048), its byte values in decimal and hex, and the bits. Multi-byte characters show all their bytes on one row, so you can see that the leading bits of a UTF-8 byte (110, 1110, 11110) say how many bytes belong to the character and that continuation bytes always start with 10.
Spaces, tabs and new lines are characters too: a space is 32 (00100000) and a new line is 10 (00001010). They appear in the table by name.
Separators and formatting
Most binary puzzles and homework write one byte per group separated by spaces, which is the default. Choose None for a continuous string (useful for checksums or some programming exercises), Comma to paste into an array, or New line for one byte per line. The bits themselves are the same in every format; the separator only changes how they are laid out.
Translating binary back to text
Switch Direction to Binary → Text to decode. The decoder accepts bytes with or without spaces, ignores commas and line breaks, and reads 7-bit groups if every group has seven digits. For a fuller decoder with decimal, hex and octal output and invalid-input checks, use binary to text. For plain ASCII codes and the complete 0–127 table, use the ASCII to binary converter.
Is my text private?
This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your text is not uploaded to our servers.