Text to Binary Converter
Convert text into its binary representation and back again. Encoding uses UTF-8, so accented characters and emoji convert correctly rather than being mangled.
How text becomes binary
Every character maps to a number, and that number is written in base 2. The letter H is 72 in ASCII, which is 01001000 in eight bits. Text is converted character by character, producing one byte — eight bits — per ASCII character. Characters outside ASCII take more than one byte in UTF-8: é takes two, and most emoji take four.
ASCII and UTF-8
ASCII defines 128 characters in 7 bits, covering unaccented English letters, digits, and common punctuation. UTF-8 extends this to every character in Unicode while remaining backward compatible — any ASCII character has exactly the same single-byte representation in UTF-8. That compatibility is why UTF-8 became the web's default encoding, and it means the binary for plain English text is identical either way.
Reading binary by hand
Each bit position is a power of two, reading right to left: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128. Add the values where a bit is 1. So 01001000 is 64 + 8 = 72, which is H. Two shortcuts help: uppercase letters run from 65 (A) and lowercase from 97 (a), so lowercase always has the 32 bit set. Digits 0–9 start at 48.