Text to Binary Converter
Convert text to binary, hex, octal or decimal bytes and back, in UTF-8, UTF-16 or Latin-1.
How to use the Text to Binary Converter
- 1Type text to see its bytes in binary, hex, octal or decimal.
- 2Choose the character set, separator and prefixes to match what your code or course expects.
- 3Switch to Bytes → text to decode. The format is detected automatically, with or without separators.
About Text to Binary Converter
The Text to Binary Converter turns text into its bytes and shows them as binary, hexadecimal, octal or decimal numbers, and decodes such byte sequences back to text. You choose the character set, UTF-8, UTF-16 LE or BE, Latin-1, Windows-1252 or ASCII, which decides how characters become bytes, so you can see why é takes two bytes in UTF-8 but one in Latin-1.
The output can be separated by spaces, commas, line breaks, nothing or a custom separator, with optional prefixes like 0b or 0x, uppercase hex and zero padding. When decoding, the binary translator detects the number format automatically and reads long runs of 0s and 1s with or without separators.
Students use it to learn how computers store text and to check homework on ASCII and binary, developers to inspect the exact bytes of a string, prepare byte arrays for code or debug encoding problems, and puzzle fans to decode binary messages. It works as a text to hex and hex to text converter as well.
Frequently asked questions
How is text converted to binary?
Each character is first turned into bytes by a character set, usually UTF-8. Each byte is then written as eight binary digits. The letter A is byte 65, which is 01000001.
Why do some characters use more than one byte?
UTF-8 stores ASCII in one byte and everything else in two to four bytes: é takes two, € three and most emoji four. UTF-16 uses two or four bytes per character, Latin-1 exactly one but only for 256 characters.
How do I convert binary back to text?
Choose Bytes → text and paste the binary. Spaces between bytes are optional: a long run of 0s and 1s is split into groups of eight. If the result shows �, the bytes were written in a different character set.
How is this different from the Number Base Converter?
This tool converts text through its character encoding. To convert a single number such as 255 between binary, hex and decimal, including signed values and bit patterns, use the Number Base Converter.
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