Binary Translator

Convert any text into binary code — the 1s and 0s a computer actually stores — and decode binary back into readable text. Every byte is also shown in hexadecimal and decimal so you can see the same data in all three forms.

Direction:

Binary (UTF-8, 8-bit bytes)

01001000 01101001

Hexadecimal bytes

48 69

Decimal bytes

72 105

2 bytes — every view above shows the same UTF-8 bytes in a different number base.

📌 Text is encoded as UTF-8: plain English letters take 1 byte (8 bits) each, while accented letters and emoji take 2–4 bytes. Decoding tolerates missing spaces when the length is a clean multiple of 8.
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How letters become bytes

Computers only store numbers, so every character you type is assigned a code. The ASCII standard (1963) numbered English letters, digits, and punctuation from 0 to 127, and UTF-8 — the encoding used by essentially the whole web today — keeps those same codes for English text. A capital A is code 65, and 65 written as an 8-bit binary byte is 01000001:

"A" → code 65 → 01000001 (binary) = 41 (hex)

"B" → code 66 → 01000010 (binary) = 42 (hex)

"a" → code 97 → 01100001 (binary) = 61 (hex)

Lowercase letters sit exactly 32 codes above their uppercase versions, which in binary means flipping a single bit — compare A and a above. Characters outside basic English, like é or an emoji, use 2–4 bytes each under UTF-8, and the translator handles those automatically.

Note that this tool converts text character by character. If you want to convert a number as a value — say 255 into 11111111 — use the number base converter instead.

Binary, hex, and decimal — three views of one byte

The secondary rows under the result show the very same bytes in hexadecimal and decimal. Programmers prefer hex because one hex digit represents exactly four bits, so a byte is always two hex characters: 01001000 becomes 48. Decimal is what the byte "is" as an ordinary number — 72 in that case. Nothing changes about the data itself; only the notation does.

More text & number tools

Encode the same message a different way with the Morse code translator — complete with audio playback — or convert numbers and dates with the Roman numeral converter. The number base converter moves values between binary, decimal, and hex, and the character counter tells you how many characters — and therefore roughly how many bytes — your text has.

Frequently asked questions