Binary translator
Text becomes bytes, bytes become text, with hex and decimal alongside so you can see the same data three ways.
Guide
How to use it
- Pick the direction, text to binary or binary to text.
- Type or paste, translation is live.
- Going to binary, you also get hex and decimal rows, the same bytes in three notations.
- Going to text, paste 8-bit groups (spacing optional), oddities are flagged rather than silently mangled.
Examples
Reading the output
"Hi": H is 72 in ASCII, binary 01001000, i is 105, 01101001. Every ASCII character is one byte, the leading 0 marks it as the 7-bit ASCII range.
The pound sign encodes as 11000010 10100011 in UTF-8, two bytes. Accents take two, most emoji four, byte count and character count are different things.
The same "Hi" in hexadecimal. One hex pair per byte is why programmers prefer it: 48 69 reads faster than sixteen bits, with zero information lost.
Method
How it works
Text encodes through UTF-8, the encoding of essentially the entire modern web, ASCII characters take one byte, everything else two to four. Decoding is strict: invalid UTF-8 sequences are flagged and shown with replacement marks rather than guessed at.
The hex and decimal rows are the identical bytes re-notated, binary for seeing the bits, hex for humans, decimal for calculators. Conversion is local and instant.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Why 8 digits per letter?
Computers address memory in 8-bit bytes, and UTF-8 encodes ASCII in exactly one byte. The grouping is the machine’s, not the alphabet’s.
Why does one emoji become four groups?
UTF-8 spends more bytes on rarer characters: ASCII one, European accents two, most CJK three, emoji four. The byte counter under the output does this arithmetic for you.
Is binary encryption?
Not remotely, it is notation, like writing a number in Roman numerals. Anyone (and this page) converts it straight back.
What if my binary has 7-bit groups?
Old ASCII dumps sometimes drop the leading zero. Add a 0 to the front of each group, if the bit count is not a multiple of 8, the tool says so rather than guessing.
Big-endian or little-endian?
Bits within each byte read most-significant first here, the universal convention for written binary. Endianness proper concerns multi-byte machine words, not text notation.
Can I convert files, not text?
For files you want Base64, the encoding built for binary data in text form, this site has a tool for it.
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