Binary Code Translator
Type text to see it as 8-bit binary, or paste binary in groups of eight digits to read the message. The translator works on UTF-8 bytes, so accents and emoji survive the round trip, and it tells you exactly which group is wrong when decoding fails. Free, no sign-up, and nothing you type is uploaded.
Direction
How to Use the Binary Code Translator
- 1. Choose a direction. Auto-detect decodes input made only of groups of exactly eight 0s and 1s separated by whitespace, and encodes everything else. Text → Binary and Binary → Text force the direction.
- 2. Type or paste. For decoding, give groups of exactly eight digits separated by spaces or line breaks.
- 3. Read the output. Encoding shows one 8-bit group per byte; decoding shows the text. A byte count sits underneath.
- 4. Copy it. Copy Result copies the output; Clear empties the box.
How Text Becomes Binary
A computer stores each byte as eight binary digits (bits). Each bit position has a value, doubling from right to left: 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1. To read a byte, add up the values where there is a 1. For 01001000 those are 64 and 8, giving 72 — and 72 is the code for the letter H. The second byte of "Hi", 01101001, is 64 + 32 + 8 + 1 = 105, which is i.
| Bit value | 128 | 64 | 32 | 16 | 8 | 4 | 2 | 1 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| H = 72 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| i = 105 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
The tool does not use a made-up "binary alphabet". It encodes your text as UTF-8 (RFC 3629) and prints each byte in binary. English letters, digits and punctuation take one byte and match their ASCII codes. Other characters take two to four bytes, and the leading bits show how many:
| Bytes | Pattern of the bytes | Example |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0xxxxxxx | A = 01000001 |
| 2 | 110xxxxx 10xxxxxx | é = 11000011 10101001 |
| 3 | 1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx | € = 11100010 10000010 10101100 |
| 4 | 11110xxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx | 😀 = four bytes |
Worked Example
Text
Cite
Binary
01000011 01101001 01110100 01100101
Size
4 bytes
Decoding reverses the steps: 01000011 is 67 (C), 01101001 is 105 (i), 01110100 is 116 (t) and 01100101 is 101 (e). Each group has to be exactly eight digits. With Binary → Text selected, a group of seven, nine or sixteen is rejected with a message listing the first few offenders, so run-together binary such as 0100100001101001 must be split into bytes first.
Surprises to Avoid
- Only 8-digit groups count as binary. In Auto-detect, a short string such as
101or1100is encoded as text. Run-together or odd-sized binary is not decoded automatically either: choose Binary → Text to see which groups are invalid. - Bytes, not characters. The count shown is bytes. An emoji is one character but four bytes, so a short message can produce more groups than it has characters.
- Garbled output (�). Valid 8-bit groups that do not form valid UTF-8 decode to the replacement character. The data may be in another encoding or may not be text.
- This is encoding, not encryption. Binary is only another way of writing the same bytes; anyone can reverse it.
Which Tool Do You Need?
This page translates text to binary bytes. If you want a number converted between binary, decimal, octal and hex, use the Number Base Converter; for binary arithmetic there is the Binary Calculator. The same text as hexadecimal bytes is Text to Hex, as decimal character codes ASCII Converter, and as Base64 or URL encoding Text Encoder & Decoder.
Frequently Asked Questions
- How do I convert text to binary?
- Type or paste your text with the direction on Text → Binary (or leave Auto-detect). Each character is converted to UTF-8 bytes and every byte is shown as eight binary digits, so Hi becomes 01001000 01101001.
- How do I convert binary back to text?
- Paste the binary as groups of eight digits separated by spaces or line breaks. The tool checks that every group is exactly eight 0s and 1s, then decodes the bytes as UTF-8. Invalid groups are named in the error message.
- What encoding does the translator use?
- UTF-8. ASCII characters are one byte and match their ASCII binary values; accented letters, symbols and emoji take two to four bytes.
- Why does one character sometimes produce several bytes?
- Only 128 characters fit in the one-byte ASCII range. UTF-8 spreads other characters over two, three or four bytes, each marked with leading bits so that the decoder knows where a character starts.
- Why does my binary fail with an error about groups of 8?
- Every group must have exactly eight digits. Binary copied without spaces, or with leading zeros dropped (65 as
1000001instead of01000001), will fail until you re-split it into full bytes. - Is binary the same as ASCII?
- ASCII is a table that gives each of 128 characters a number from 0 to 127; binary is a way of writing numbers. Writing an ASCII code in binary, padded to eight digits, is what this tool does for English text.
- Is my text sent to a server?
- No. The conversion uses your browser's built-in TextEncoder and TextDecoder, and nothing you type leaves your device.