Text to Binary Converter
Turn any text into 8-bit binary bytes — and decode binary back into readable text.
Text becomes binary one character at a time: each character is stored as one or more bytes, and every byte is written as 8 bits. The word “Hi” is the bytes 72 and 105, so in binary it is 01001000 01101001. To decode, read each 8-bit group back into a character.
How text becomes binary
Computers store text as numbers. Each character is assigned a code — “H” is 72, “i” is 105 — and that code is saved as bytes. A byte is 8 bits, so every byte is written as a string of eight 0s and 1s. For ordinary English letters, digits, and punctuation (the ASCII range 0–127), one character is exactly one byte, which is why the conversion looks so tidy: one character in, eight bits out. This tool uses UTF-8, the encoding the web is built on, where those first 128 codes are identical to plain ASCII.
Worked example: encoding “Hi”
Take the two letters, look up each code, and pad each to 8 bits.
- 1 Split the text into characters. “Hi” is two characters: H and i.
- 2 Find each character’s code. H is 72 and i is 105 in ASCII / UTF-8.
- 3 Convert each code to binary. 72 is 1001000 and 105 is 1101001 in base 2.
- 4 Pad each byte to 8 bits. Add a leading zero so each fills a full byte: 01001000 and 01101001.
- 5 Join the bytes with spaces. The result is 01001000 01101001 — one 8-bit group per byte.
Characters and their 8-bit binary
Common characters, their ASCII code, and the byte written in binary.
| Character | ASCII code | 8-bit binary |
|---|---|---|
| A | 65 | 01000001 |
| a | 97 | 01100001 |
| (space) | 32 | 00100000 |
| 0 (digit zero) | 48 | 00110000 |
Bytes, ASCII, and decoding
8 bits make 1 byte, and one byte can hold any value from 0 to 255 — enough for all 128 ASCII characters with room to spare. UTF-8 keeps ASCII as single bytes but uses two to four bytes for characters outside that range, such as accented letters, symbols, or emoji; each byte still shows as its own 8-bit group. Decoding runs the process backwards: split the binary on spaces, read each 8-bit group as a number, and map that number back to its character. Because every group is a fixed 8 bits, the spaces are only for readability — the byte boundaries are what actually matter.