Text to Binary Converter

By Calxy · Calculation methodology

Turn text into binary, hexadecimal or decimal bytes using UTF-8, or decode bytes back into text, and see the code of every character in a table.

Printed from Calxy · https://www.calxy.net/tech/text-to-binary-converter

Text as binary bytes01001000 01101001 00100001

Text to encode, or bytes to decode. When decoding, bytes may be separated by spaces, commas or new lines.

Text as binary bytes

01001000 01101001 00100001

  • Characters (code points)3
  • UTF-8 bytes3
  • Bits24
Character codes
CharacterCode point (decimal)Code point (hex)UTF-8 bytes (hex)UTF-8 bytes (binary)
H72U+00484801001000
i105U+00696901101001
!33U+00212100100001

Encoding uses UTF-8, the web's standard encoding. ASCII characters (code points 0–127) take one byte with the same value as their ASCII code; other characters take two to four bytes.

How this was calculated

"H" is code point U+0048 (72); UTF-8 stores it as 1 byte: 01001000.

Each of the 3 UTF-8 bytes is written in binary, padded to 8 digits.

How text becomes binary

Every character has a Unicode code point. UTF-8, the encoding used by almost all web pages, stores that code point as one to four bytes, and each byte is 8 bits. The converter encodes your text with UTF-8, then writes each byte in the format you choose.

The letters in "Hi!" are ASCII, so each is one byte equal to its ASCII code: H = 72 = 01001000, i = 105 = 01101001 and ! = 33 = 00100001. The euro sign € is code point U+20AC and takes three bytes, E2 82 AC in hex.

UTF-8 byte lengths
Code pointsBytesExamples
U+0000–U+007F1ASCII letters, digits, punctuation
U+0080–U+07FF2é, ñ, Greek, Cyrillic
U+0800–U+FFFF3€, most CJK characters
U+10000–U+10FFFF4emoji such as 😀

Decoding bytes back to text

Choose Bytes → text, pick the byte format and paste the bytes. Separate them with spaces, commas or new lines; binary written without separators is split into 8-bit groups and hex into 2-digit groups. A 0b or 0x prefix on each byte is accepted.

If a value is over 255, a binary group is not a whole number of bytes, or the bytes do not form valid UTF-8 (for example a lone C3), you get an error instead of garbled text.

ASCII versus Unicode

ASCII defines codes 0 to 127 only. Those code points encode to the same single byte in UTF-8, so an ASCII table and this converter agree for English text. Characters outside ASCII have no ASCII code; the table shows their Unicode code point and UTF-8 bytes instead.

How to use the Text to Binary Converter

Choose a direction and a byte format, then enter text or bytes.

  1. Choose the direction

    Pick Text → bytes to encode, or Bytes → text to decode.

  2. Choose the byte format

    Select binary, hexadecimal or decimal, and a separator for encoded output.

  3. Enter your input

    Type or paste the text or the bytes.

  4. Read the result

    Copy the output and check each character's code in the table.

References

Frequently asked questions

What is "hello" in binary?

In UTF-8 or ASCII it is 01101000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111, one 8-bit byte per letter (h = 104, e = 101, l = 108, o = 111).

Why do some characters use more than 8 bits?

Only ASCII characters fit in one byte. UTF-8 uses two to four bytes for other characters, so é is 11000011 10101001 and an emoji takes four bytes.

Does this use code points or bytes?

The converted output is UTF-8 bytes. The table also lists each character's Unicode code point in decimal and hex, which equals its ASCII code for characters 0 to 127.

Last updated . Results are estimates for informational purposes only.