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Binary translator

Turn text into binary code, hex or decimal byte values, or paste binary or hex to read it as text. It uses UTF-8, the encoding the web uses, so accented letters and emoji convert correctly.

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Binary
The code appears here.
The link keeps your format settings, never your text.
  • Nothing is uploaded
  • Free, no sign-up
  • Works on phone and desktop

How to use the binary translator

  1. 1

    Type or paste text to see it as binary: eight ones and zeros for every byte.

  2. 2

    Switch the output to hex, decimal, octal or Unicode code points, with or without spaces.

  3. 3

    Paste binary, hex or decimal bytes instead, and they are read back as text automatically.

  4. 4

    Check the character by character table to see how each letter or emoji becomes bytes.

Features

  • Both directions

    Text to binary, hex, octal, decimal and code points, and binary, hex, decimal or octal back to text, detected as you paste.

  • UTF-8, like the web

    Accents, symbols and emoji convert correctly, and bytes that aren't valid UTF-8 get a clear message saying which byte is wrong.

  • Forgiving input

    Spaces, commas, line breaks, 0x and \x prefixes are all fine. Missing or extra bits are pointed out, not silently dropped.

  • Private

    Everything is converted in your browser. Your text is never uploaded or put in the link.

Bits, bytes and how text becomes binary

Computers store everything as bits, each a 0 or a 1. Eight bits make a byte, which can hold 2⁸ = 256 different values, from 00000000 (0) to 11111111 (255). To store text, every character is given a number, and the number is written as one or more bytes. The rule that maps characters to bytes is called a character encoding.

To read a byte by hand, give the eight positions the values 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2 and 1, and add up the positions that hold a 1. For the letter H, 01001000 has ones in the 64 and 8 positions, so it is 64 + 8 = 72, which is the code for a capital H. The whole word "Hello" is 01001000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111.

ASCII and UTF-8

ASCII, first published in the United States in 1963, gives codes 0 to 127 to the English alphabet, digits, punctuation and some control codes. Those 128 values fit in 7 bits, so each ASCII character fills one byte with a 0 to spare. ASCII has no room for accented letters, other alphabets or symbols such as €.

UTF-8 solves that. Designed by Ken Thompson, with Rob Pike, in 1992 and standardized in RFC 3629, it can store every character in Unicode, using one to four bytes. The first 128 characters are the same single bytes as ASCII, so old English text is already valid UTF-8. Other characters use two, three or four bytes, each of which starts with 1, so a program can never confuse them with ASCII. According to W3Techs, about 99% of websites whose encoding is known used UTF-8 in October 2026, which is why this translator uses it.

CharacterCode pointUTF-8 in hexUTF-8 in binaryBytes
A (Latin capital A)U+004141010000011
é (e with acute accent)U+00E9C3 A911000011 101010012
€ (Euro sign)U+20ACE2 82 AC11100010 10000010 101011003
😀 (Grinning face emoji)U+1F600F0 9F 98 8011110000 10011111 10011000 100000004

Some things that look like one character are several code points. The thumbs-up with a medium skin tone, 👍🏽, is 2 code points (U+1F44D and U+1F3FD) and takes 8 bytes. That is also why a single emoji can count as more than one character on some sites.

Hex, octal and decimal

Long strings of ones and zeros are hard to read, so bytes are often written in other bases. In hexadecimal (base 16, digits 0 to 9 and A to F), each byte is exactly two digits, so "Hello" is 48 65 6C 6C 6F; programmers often write a hex byte as 0x48. Decimal byte values (0 to 255) are easiest to read, and octal (base 8) still appears in some older systems and Unix file permissions. The tool reads all of them back, with or without spaces between the bytes.

For other kinds of code, try the Morse code translator, which turns text into dots and dashes and plays them as sound. To write numbers out in words, use number to words, and to count how many characters a message has, the character counter shows the limits for posts and text messages.

Frequently asked questions

How do I convert binary to text?

Paste the binary into the box. The translator splits it into bytes of eight bits, turns each byte into a number from 0 to 255 and reads those numbers as UTF-8 text. Spaces between the bytes are optional. If the number of bits isn't a multiple of eight, it tells you, because a digit is probably missing or extra.

What is "Hello" in binary?

01001000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111. That is five bytes, one for each letter: in hex 48 65 6C 6C 6F, and in decimal 72 101 108 108 111.

Why does an emoji take 32 bits?

UTF-8 stores each character in one to four bytes. The 128 ASCII characters (English letters, digits and basic punctuation) take one byte; accented Latin letters and many other alphabets take two; most other symbols, including the euro sign and Chinese characters, take three; and emoji, which have code points above U+FFFF, take four bytes, or 32 bits.

Is this ASCII or UTF-8?

Both, in a sense. UTF-8 was designed so that the 128 ASCII characters keep exactly the same single-byte codes, so plain English text gives the same binary either way. The difference shows with anything else: ASCII has no code for é or €, while UTF-8 does.

Why does it say my bytes aren't valid UTF-8?

Not every sequence of bytes is UTF-8 text. A byte from 0x80 to 0xBF can only continue a character, never start one, and bytes such as 0xC0, 0xC1 and 0xF5 to 0xFF never appear. The message names the first byte that breaks the rules. If the data came from an old Windows or Western European program, it may be in Windows-1252 instead, and the tool shows that reading too.

What is the difference between binary, hex, octal and decimal?

They are four ways to write the same byte. The letter H is the byte 01001000 in binary (base 2), 48 in hexadecimal (base 16), 110 in octal (base 8) and 72 in decimal (base 10). Hex is popular with programmers because each byte is exactly two hex digits.

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