Text to Binary Converter

What this tool does

Every character a computer stores is really a number, and every number is really a pattern of bits. This tool makes that visible: it takes your text and shows the binary — or hexadecimal, or decimal — behind each character. It is a learning aid, a debugging helper, and an encoder you can round-trip with the matching Binary to Text decoder.

How to use it

1. Type or paste your text.
2. Choose whether to encode as UTF-8 bytes (the standard, and what the decoder expects) or as Unicode code points.
3. Pick the output base — binary, hexadecimal or decimal — and a separator.
4. Copy the output, or use Swap to send it to the input for further work.

How the encoding works

In UTF-8 bytes mode, the text is first encoded as UTF-8 — the standard way text is stored and transmitted on the web. Each resulting byte becomes one value in the output. An ASCII letter is a single byte, an accented Latin character is two, a Korean or Chinese character is three, and most emoji are four. This is the mode to use if you want the binary to decode back to the original text.

In Unicode code point mode, each character's code point number is shown directly, regardless of how many bytes it would take to store. This is closer to the "one number per character" mental model and is useful for learning, but a single code point above 255 cannot be represented as one byte, so this mode is for inspection rather than round-tripping through the byte decoder.

Zero-padding keeps each value a fixed width — 8 bits for a byte in binary, 2 digits in hex — which lines the output up neatly and, crucially, lets the decoder split an unseparated stream back into bytes. Turning padding off produces shorter but ambiguous output. The whole conversion runs in your browser.

Examples

ASCII. The word Hi in UTF-8 binary is 01001000 01101001 — 72 and 105, the code points for H and i.

Hexadecimal. The same Hi in hex is 48 69, which is why hex is the compact way to show byte values.

Multi-byte. The character é in UTF-8 is two bytes: 11000011 10101001. In code-point mode it is a single value, 233. That difference is exactly why the byte mode round-trips and the code-point mode does not, for characters above 127.

Common use cases

• Learning how text is stored as bytes and bits.
• Teaching character encoding, ASCII and UTF-8.
• Debugging encoding issues by inspecting the exact bytes of a string.
• Creating binary-themed puzzles or messages.
• Preparing data for a system that expects binary or hex input.

Privacy and security

Encoding runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded. Your settings are saved locally. See the privacy policy.