Binary to text

Decoding binary messages

Binary text is a sequence of bytes written as eight bits each. To read it, split the bits into groups of eight, turn each group into a number from 0 to 255, and look the number up in the character encoding. For plain English text that encoding is ASCII, so 01000001 (65) is A and 00100000 (32) is a space. For everything else the modern standard is UTF-8, where accented letters and emoji span several bytes.

This translator handles both, because UTF-8 is identical to ASCII for the first 128 values. It ignores spaces and line breaks, so you can paste bits in any layout.

Worked example

01001000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111 → 72, 101, 108, 108, 111 → Hello. If you see an error about a multiple of 8, a bit is missing or extra; if you see "not valid UTF-8", the bits were probably produced with a different encoding or are not text at all.

The page removes spaces, commas and line breaks, checks that only 0 and 1 remain and that their count is a multiple of eight, then converts each group of eight bits into a byte. The bytes are decoded as UTF-8 in strict mode, so a truncated or invalid sequence is reported rather than silently replaced. Switch to Encode to turn text into binary. Everything runs in this tab.