Binary Translator
Type text and see it as binary: each character becomes its UTF-8 bytes, each byte written as eight 0s and 1s, with a space between bytes. Paste binary and the tool reads it back to text, with or without the spaces. The round trip is exact for any text, including accented letters, other scripts and emoji, and capitals stay capitals.
How to use the binary translator
- Type or paste text. The binary appears as you type, one 8-bit byte per character with a space between bytes.
- To decode, switch to binary to text and paste the 0s and 1s. Spaces between bytes are optional.
- Accented letters, other scripts and emoji take two to four bytes each; the decoder reads them back correctly.
- Copy the result with the copy button.
Examples
| Hi | 01001000 01101001 |
| Hello, World! | 01001000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111 00101100 00100000 01010111 01101111 01110010 01101100 01100100 00100001 |
| café | 01100011 01100001 01100110 11000011 10101001 |
About binary
Everything a computer stores is made of bits, digits that are either 0 or 1. A group of eight bits is a byte, and a byte can hold 256 different values, from 00000000 to 11111111, or 0 to 255 in decimal. Text is stored by agreeing on a number for each character. The agreement most people meet first is ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, published in 1963 and revised into its final form in 1967, which assigns the numbers 0 to 127 to the English letters, the digits, common punctuation and a set of control codes such as line feed. Capital A is 65, which in binary is 01000001; lowercase a is 97, which is 01100001. The two differ in a single bit, the sixth from the right, and every letter pair works the same way, which is why upper and lower case look so alike in binary.
ASCII stops at 127 and has no room for é, ß, Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese or emoji. Unicode assigns a number, called a code point, to every character in every script, more than 150,000 of them so far, and UTF-8 is the way those numbers are written as bytes. It was designed in 1992 by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike and is now the encoding of almost every web page. Its rule is that the first 128 code points, the ASCII characters, take one byte each, unchanged from ASCII, and everything else takes two, three or four bytes whose leading bits announce how long the sequence is. So é, code point 233, is written as two bytes, 11000011 10101001, a Chinese character is three, and an emoji is four. That is why the binary for a word with an accent is longer than its letter count suggests, and why a decoder that assumed one byte per character would misread it.
This translator uses UTF-8. It takes each character you type, looks up its code point, writes the UTF-8 bytes for it, and prints each byte as exactly eight binary digits, padded with leading zeros where the value is small, with one space between bytes. "Hi" becomes 01001000 01101001. A space between words is itself a character, byte 00100000, so it appears in the output like any other, and so do commas, full stops and line breaks. Case is preserved, because A and a have different codes. Digits are encoded as characters too: the digit 5 comes out as 00110101, the ASCII code for the character, not as 00000101, the number five. Nothing is translated in the linguistic sense. The text stays in whatever language you typed it, and only its representation changes.
Decoding reads the digits back. The tool collects every 0 and 1 in the box, ignoring spaces and line breaks, takes them eight at a time, and passes the bytes through a UTF-8 decoder, so 0100100001101001 with no spaces decodes to Hi exactly as the spaced form does. Because encoder and decoder follow the same rules the round trip is exact: anything you encode here decodes to the same text, accents, emoji and all. Two things can go wrong with binary from elsewhere. A string whose length is not a multiple of eight has a digit dropped or a byte cut short, and its last character will be wrong. And a sequence of bytes that is not valid UTF-8, for instance text encoded in Windows-1252 or Latin-1, where é is the single byte 11101001, decodes to a replacement character rather than the intended letter.
People use binary text for the same reasons they use Morse: puzzles and escape rooms, classroom exercises, geocaching clues, T-shirts and tattoos, and the occasional hidden message in a game. Some things this page does not do. It does not convert numbers: typing 255 gives you the three characters 2, 5 and 5, each as its own byte, not 11111111. It does not produce hexadecimal, octal or decimal byte values, and it does not read them, though hexadecimal is only a regrouping of the same bits, four to a digit. It does not encrypt anything; binary is an encoding that anyone can reverse with this page or any other, so it hides text from a glance and from nothing else. The conversion runs in your browser and no text is sent to a server.
Frequently asked questions
Why is every character eight digits long?
Because computers store text in bytes, and a byte is eight bits. A byte can hold 256 values, and the tool always writes all eight digits, padding with leading zeros, so that 65 is 01000001 rather than 1000001. That fixed width is also what lets the decoder work without spaces: it simply takes the digits eight at a time. Characters outside ASCII take two, three or four bytes, so they appear as two to four groups.
What is the difference between ASCII and UTF-8, and which does this tool use?
ASCII is a 1960s table of 128 characters, enough for English. UTF-8, from 1992, encodes every Unicode character and keeps the 128 ASCII characters as single bytes with the same values, so for plain English text the two are identical. The difference appears with accents, other scripts and emoji, which ASCII cannot write at all and UTF-8 writes as two to four bytes. This tool uses UTF-8, so any text you type round-trips exactly.
Why does é come out as two bytes?
é is Unicode code point 233, above the 127 that fit in one byte under UTF-8 rules, so it is written as a two-byte sequence, 11000011 10101001. The first byte begins with 110, which tells a decoder that a second byte follows, and the second begins with 10, which marks it as a continuation. Older single-byte encodings such as Latin-1 wrote é as one byte, 11101001, and binary produced that way will not decode correctly here.
Why is 01000001 A but 01100001 a?
Capital A is 65 and lowercase a is 97 in ASCII, and 97 is 65 plus 32. In binary, adding 32 sets the sixth bit from the right, so every capital letter and its lowercase form differ in exactly that one bit. The designers chose the arrangement deliberately, so that case could be changed by flipping a single bit. The tool preserves the case you type; it never converts one to the other.
Is this a translation? Is binary a language?
No to both. Binary is not a language but a way of writing numbers, and text becomes binary only through an agreed table of numbers for characters. This tool applies that table and its reverse; the words stay in whatever language you typed them. It is an encoding, and like Morse code it can be read back exactly by anyone who knows the table. It is not a cipher and offers no secrecy.
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