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Text to Binary Converter

Turn any text into binary bytes, or decode a row of 0s and 1s back into readable text.

Input base:

Uppercase letters Group digits Also show base:

How to Use

Type or paste your text. The binary appears below as you type.
Change Format to Hexadecimal, Decimal or Octal for other byte notations.
Pick space, comma or no separator between bytes.
To decode, switch Direction to Numbers to text and paste the binary.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does one letter become 8 digits?

Each byte is written as 8 binary digits, padded with zeros. Basic English letters take one byte each, so A is 01000001.

Why do accented letters and emoji give more bytes?

Text is encoded as UTF-8, where characters outside basic English take two to four bytes. é is 11000011 10101001, and most emoji take four bytes.

How do I convert binary back to text?

Set Direction to Numbers to text and paste the bytes, separated by spaces or commas, or run together in groups of eight.

Is my text uploaded?

No. The conversion happens in your browser.

Convert Text to Binary Online

Updated September 29, 2026 · By Saman

Every character you type is stored as one or more bytes, and every byte is eight bits. Seeing text as binary is a classic exercise in computer science classes, a way to hide a message in a puzzle, and a practical check when debugging an encoding problem. This page opens the Text tab of the Number Base Converter.

An example

Character	Decimal	Hex	Binary
`H`	72	`48`	`01001000`
`i`	105	`69`	`01101001`
`!`	33	`21`	`00100001`

So Hi! in binary is 01001000 01101001 00100001.

ASCII and UTF-8

For basic English letters, digits and punctuation, UTF-8 and ASCII agree: one byte per character. Beyond that, UTF-8 uses two bytes for most accented Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic and Hebrew letters, three for most Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters, and four for emoji. The converter always uses UTF-8, the encoding of the web, so the bytes match what a program or a file would contain.

Decoding binary back to text

In Numbers to text mode the converter accepts bytes separated by spaces, commas or line breaks, or one long run of digits that it cuts into groups of eight. A value above 255, a digit that is not 0 or 1, or a byte sequence that is not valid UTF-8 is reported instead of producing garbled text.

Related tools

For numbers rather than text, use decimal to binary. To encode text for transport rather than for reading bits, the Base64 encoder is the usual choice.