Text to Binary Converter

Convert text to binary and binary back to text. Supports ASCII and UTF-8 encoding with space-separated bytes.

Text to Binary Converter tool

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Example

Input: Hi!

Result: 01001000 01101001 00100001

Each character is encoded as UTF-8 and every byte is written as 8 binary digits: H is 72, i is 105 and ! is 33.

Characters in UTF-8 Binary

CharacterCode pointBytesBinary
AU+0041101000001
aU+0061101100001
ZU+005A101011010
0U+0030100110000
(space)U+0020100100000
!U+0021100100001
éU+00E9211000011 10101001
€U+20AC311100010 10000010 10101100
😀U+1F600411110000 10011111 10011000 10000000
  1. Type or paste plain text into the Text input field to convert it to binary.
  2. View the space-separated 8-bit binary output that appears instantly for each character.
  3. To convert binary to text, enter space-separated binary values (e.g., 01001000 01101001) into the Binary input field.
  4. Multi-byte characters like emoji are encoded automatically as UTF-8, producing several 8-bit groups (plain ASCII text gives one group per character).
  5. Click the copy button to copy the binary output or decoded text to your clipboard.

How Text Becomes Binary Code

This converter turns text into binary, the 1s and 0s that computers store, and turns binary back into text. Each character becomes one or more 8-bit bytes, separated by spaces, so "Hi!" becomes 01001000 01101001 00100001.

Computers store letters as numbers. The capital letter A is number 65, which is 01000001 in binary. The tool uses UTF-8, the encoding used by the vast majority of web pages. In UTF-8, the 128 basic ASCII characters take one byte each. Those are the English letters, digits and common symbols. Other characters need more bytes: é takes 2, the euro sign takes 3 and most emoji take 4. So a short message with one emoji can give a longer binary string than you expect.

To decode, paste binary into the right-hand panel. Groups of up to 8 digits separated by spaces work, and so does one long run with no spaces, as long as its length is a multiple of 8. If a group holds anything other than 0 and 1, or the bytes do not form valid UTF-8, you get a clear error instead of garbled text.

Binary is a fun way to hide a message in a puzzle and a common task in computing classes. To see the same numbers in hexadecimal or decimal, use the Number Base Converter. For Unicode code points rather than bytes, try Text to Unicode.

Sources

Frequently Asked Questions

In UTF-8 or ASCII, "hello" is 01101000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111. Each group is one letter: h is 104, e is 101, l is 108 and o is 111. A capital H would start with 010 instead of 011, because capital letters sit 32 places lower in the character table.
Computers group bits into bytes of 8. One byte can hold 256 values, from 00000000 to 11111111, which is enough for every basic ASCII character. Leading zeros are kept so every byte has the same width. That makes the binary easy to read and easy to split back into letters.
Give the 8 positions the values 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2 and 1, from left to right. Add up the values where there is a 1. For 01000001 that is 64 + 1 = 65, which is the letter A. Then look up the number in an ASCII table.
UTF-8 uses 1 to 4 bytes per character. Basic ASCII fits in one byte, accented Latin letters need 2, most other symbols need 3, and characters above U+FFFF, which includes most emoji, need 4. Older ASCII-only systems cannot store these characters at all, which is one reason UTF-8 became the standard.

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