Text to binary

How text becomes bits

Computers store text as numbers, and the numbers as bits. Today almost all text is stored in UTF-8: English letters, digits and punctuation take one byte each, exactly as in the old ASCII table (A is 65, 01000001); accented letters like é take two bytes; most Asian characters three; and emoji four. This converter shows those bytes as groups of eight bits.

It is a favourite for puzzles, classroom exercises, geeky gifts and checking what an encoding really does to a string.

Worked example

Hi is two ASCII characters: H = 72 = 01001000, i = 105 = 01101001, so the binary is 01001000 01101001. The thumbs-up emoji 👍 is one character but four bytes in UTF-8: 11110000 10011111 10010001 10001101. The leading 11110 of the first byte tells a decoder that four bytes follow together.

Reading it back

Switch to Decode, or use the binary to text page, to turn bits back into characters.

The page encodes your text as UTF-8, the encoding used by the web, and writes every resulting byte in base 2, padded to eight digits with leading zeros. ASCII characters match their classic 7-bit codes with a leading zero; other characters produce two to four bytes, whose first bits mark how many bytes belong together. You can separate the bytes with spaces or run them together. Line breaks and spaces are encoded too. Everything runs in this tab.