Binary and Text Converter

How to use Binary to Text Converter

1. 1
   Choose a direction. Text to binary, or binary back to text.
2. 2
   Paste your input. Binary can be spaced or run together in multiples of eight bits.
3. 3
   Pick a base. Binary, hexadecimal or decimal, whichever your source uses.

About converting between binary and text

Text becomes binary in two steps that are easy to conflate. First a character is mapped to a number by a character set, then that number is stored as one or more bytes by an encoding. For the first 128 characters — the ASCII range — the two steps collapse into one byte and the distinction never surfaces, which is why so much software written in English worked for decades while being subtly wrong about everything else. UTF-8 is what makes the distinction visible. It is a variable-width encoding: ASCII characters occupy one byte and are bit-for-bit identical to what ASCII would produce, while other characters take two, three or four. That design is the reason it won. Existing ASCII files were already valid UTF-8, so adoption cost nothing, and the multi-byte sequences are self-synchronising — a decoder that starts mid-stream can find the next character boundary without reading from the beginning. The practical consequence is that character count and byte count are different numbers, and neither is quite what people mean by length. A single visible symbol can be several code points, as with a flag emoji or an accented letter written as a base letter plus a combining mark, and each of those is several bytes again. Any code that assumes one character is one byte will corrupt text the first time it encounters an accent, which is why decoding here goes through a proper UTF-8 decoder rather than mapping bytes to characters directly.

Frequently asked questions