ASCII text
Hi becomes 01001000 01101001: two characters stored as two UTF-8 bytes.
7 byte(s)
56 bits
Byte inspector
First 32 UTF-8 bytes, shown in decimal, hex, and binary.
72 / 48 / 01001000105 / 69 / 0110100132 / 20 / 00100000240 / F0 / 11110000159 / 9F / 10011111145 / 91 / 10010001139 / 8B / 10001011Each group represents a byte, not necessarily one character: é takes two UTF-8 bytes and 👋 takes four. Decoding rejects incomplete bytes and invalid UTF-8. Text limit: 250,000 UTF-16 code units; binary limit: 2,250,000 input characters.
Conversions run locally in your browser. This tool does not upload input or save it to browser storage.
How to use the Text to Binary Converter
- 01
Choose text-to-binary or binary-to-text.
- 02
Enter Unicode text, or paste eight-bit binary groups separated by ASCII spaces or line breaks. A continuous bit string also works.
- 03
Choose spaced or continuous output when encoding, and review the byte count and first 32 bytes.
- 04
Copy, download, or reverse the result.
Examples
Non-ASCII text
é becomes 11000011 10101001. Those are the two UTF-8 bytes C3 A9, rather than the binary spelling of Unicode code point U+00E9.
Bytes are not characters
A code point, a displayed character, and a byte are different units. UTF-8 encodes a code point using one to four bytes; a visible emoji sequence may contain several code points. The byte count and bit count refer to the encoded data.
Strict decoding avoids hidden damage
Binary input must contain complete bytes made from only zeros and ones. If groups are separated, each group must contain a whole number of bytes. The bytes must then form valid UTF-8; malformed or truncated sequences produce an error instead of a replacement character.
What is preserved
The converter preserves whitespace, line breaks as entered in the text field, and a leading U+FEFF code point. It adds no trailing newline and performs no normalization. Browser text fields can normalize pasted line endings, so hash a file directly when its exact original bytes matter.
What to know
- Text input: 250,000 UTF-16 code units. Binary input: 2,250,000 characters.
- UTF-8 only; this is not an arbitrary binary file viewer.
Common questions
Can I decode ASCII with this tool?
Yes. ASCII bytes 00 through 7F are also valid single-byte UTF-8. The decoded result may include invisible control characters.
Why is 11111111 rejected when decoding?
It is a complete byte, but FF is not a valid UTF-8 byte sequence. A text decoder should reject it rather than pretend it represents a Unicode character.
Does it support UTF-16 or legacy code pages?
No. This tool deliberately uses UTF-8. Different character encodings can assign different meanings to the same bytes.