Text to Binary Converter
Convert text to binary and binary back to text.
Convert any text to its UTF-8 binary representation, byte by byte, or paste binary and decode it back to text. Handles emojis, CJK characters and other multi-byte Unicode correctly.
Common use cases: teaching how character encoding works, decoding a binary string from a CTF challenge, generating examples for documentation, and quickly seeing which characters in a string are single-byte ASCII vs multi-byte Unicode.
Text
Binary
Frequently asked questions
Why is each character 8 bits?
For ASCII characters, one byte (8 bits) is enough — that's the entire ASCII range. For Unicode characters outside ASCII, each is encoded as 1–4 bytes in UTF-8, so the binary output is correspondingly longer. Emoji and CJK characters typically take 3–4 bytes each.
What's the difference between ASCII and UTF-8 in binary form?
All ASCII characters have the same binary representation in UTF-8 (because UTF-8 was designed to be backward-compatible with ASCII). Characters outside ASCII have multi-byte UTF-8 sequences that start with a specific prefix pattern indicating their length.
How do I read binary back to text without a tool?
Split into 8-bit groups, convert each to decimal, then look up the ASCII character.
01001000 = 72 = "H". For UTF-8 multi-byte characters, the leading byte tells you how many bytes belong to that character.Why might decoded binary not match my original text?
Usually: missing or extra whitespace between bytes, mixing up bit order, or the original was encoded in a non-UTF-8 charset (Latin-1, Windows-1252). The decoder here assumes UTF-8 with space-separated 8-bit bytes.