Text to Binary

100% Free

Convert text to binary (UTF-8, ASCII, or Unicode 16-bit) and decode binary back to text. Live per-character breakdown.

UTF-8 / ASCII

Encode & Decode

Instant

Private

Text input

13 characters · 13 bytes

Binary output

01001000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111 00101100 00100000 01010111 01101111 01110010 01101100 01100100 00100001

Char	Code point	Binary bytes
H	U+0048	01001000
e	U+0065	01100101
l	U+006C	01101100
l	U+006C	01101100
o	U+006F	01101111
,	U+002C	00101100
⎵	U+0020	00100000
W	U+0057	01010111
o	U+006F	01101111
r	U+0072	01110010
l	U+006C	01101100
d	U+0064	01100100
!	U+0021	00100001

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How to Use

1 Choose the direction: Text → Binary to encode, or Binary → Text to decode
2 Select your encoding mode: UTF-8 (default, handles all Unicode), ASCII (7-bit), or Unicode 16-bit
3 Type or paste your input into the text area
4 Choose a byte separator (space, dash, or none) for the output
5 See the result instantly and the per-character breakdown table below
6 Click 'Copy output' or use 'Swap & flip' to reverse the direction

Features

Encodes any text to binary in UTF-8, ASCII, or 16-bit Unicode code-point mode
Decodes binary strings back to readable text — round-trips perfectly
Per-character breakdown table showing char, Unicode code-point, and binary bytes
Swap & flip button instantly reverses the direction with one click
Handles multi-byte characters including emoji and non-Latin scripts (UTF-8 mode)
Three byte-separator options: space, dash, or no separator for compact output

Why it Matters

Binary is the language computers actually use — every character you type is stored as a sequence of 0s and 1s. Understanding and working with binary encoding is foundational in computer science education, debugging text encoding bugs, and building tools that process data at the byte level. This converter makes it instant and shows you exactly which bytes represent each character, so the encoding rules become intuitive rather than abstract.

★★★★★

Use Cases

CS Education

Learn how characters map to binary — see every character's byte sequence side-by-side

Debugging Encoding

Spot encoding mismatches by inspecting the exact byte sequence of a suspicious string

Coding Challenges

Solve competitive programming problems involving binary string manipulation

Teaching Binary

Use as a live classroom demo for ASCII and UTF-8 encoding concepts

How text becomes binary

Every character you type is stored internally as a number — the character’s code-point. Binary encoding converts that number to a sequence of 0s and 1s. The letter “A” is code-point 65, which in 8-bit binary is 01000001. The encoding scheme (ASCII, UTF-8, Unicode) defines how many bits to use and how to handle characters beyond the first 128.

ASCII vs UTF-8

ASCII covers 128 characters using 7 bits — enough for English letters, digits, and basic punctuation. UTF-8 is backward-compatible with ASCII for the first 128 code-points but extends to 2–4 bytes for higher code-points, covering all Unicode. The per-character table shows the exact byte sequence for each character.

Privacy

Everything runs locally in your browser. No text is uploaded or stored.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between ASCII and UTF-8 modes?

ASCII encodes only the 128 standard characters (A–Z, a–z, 0–9, basic punctuation) using 7 or 8 bits per character. UTF-8 is a superset of ASCII for the first 128 code-points but extends to 2, 3, or 4 bytes for characters above U+007F — covering all Unicode including emoji, accented letters, and non-Latin scripts. Use UTF-8 if your text contains anything beyond plain English.

How many bytes does a character take in UTF-8?

Characters U+0000–U+007F (ASCII) use 1 byte. U+0080–U+07FF (accented letters, Arabic basics) use 2 bytes. U+0800–U+FFFF (most Asian scripts) use 3 bytes. U+10000–U+10FFFF (emoji, rare scripts) use 4 bytes. The per-character table shows the exact byte count for each character.

What does 'Unicode 16-bit' mode do differently?

In Unicode mode each character is represented as a single 16-bit value (its Unicode code-point), zero-padded to 16 digits. This is useful when you want to see code-points directly rather than the multi-byte UTF-8 encoding. It cannot correctly represent code-points above U+FFFF as a single 16-bit group.

Can I decode any binary string back to text?

Yes — paste the binary into the input, switch to 'Binary → Text', and choose the same encoding mode used to generate it. For UTF-8 each multi-byte sequence must be complete; truncated sequences produce a parse error. For ASCII each 8-bit group must be a value 0–127.

Why do emoji show 4 bytes in UTF-8 mode?

Emoji live in the Unicode Supplementary Multilingual Plane (code-points above U+FFFF), which requires 4 bytes in UTF-8. The 4-byte prefix 0xF0 followed by three continuation bytes is the standard encoding per RFC 3629.

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Want to go deeper?

Browse all guides →

Binary Encoding Guide

binary

Binary Encoding Guide: ASCII, UTF-8, Unicode, and How Text Becomes Bytes

A complete guide to binary encoding — how ASCII, UTF-8, and Unicode work, what a byte-order mark is, and the encoding bugs developers run into most often.

25 Jun 2026

5 min read

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