Text to Binary

Convert text ↔ binary, hex, decimal and octal

Type text to see its binary, hexadecimal, decimal or octal representation update live, or paste binary/hex/decimal/octal to decode it back to text. The conversion uses UTF-8 byte encoding, so letters, accents, and even emoji round-trip correctly. Everything runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded.

How the encoding works

Each character is encoded to its UTF-8 bytes, and every byte becomes an 8-bit binary group, a 2-digit hex pair, a 3-digit octal value 000–377, or a decimal number 0–255. Spaces between groups are optional when decoding — they are ignored.

Bytes, not letters

There is no such thing as "the binary for a character" without an encoding, and the one here is UTF-8. In UTF-8 an ASCII letter is one byte, so A is 01000001; a Latin letter with an accent is two; most CJK characters are three; and emoji are four. That is why a line of Korean or Japanese produces three times as many groups as the same number of English letters, and why an emoji that looks like one character becomes 32 bits. Splitting a UTF-8 stream at the wrong byte boundary is what produces the replacement character — the sequence is self-describing precisely so that a decoder can tell where a character starts.

Code points and what a "character" really is

UTF-8 encodes code points, and a code point is not always a character a person would count. A flag emoji is two regional-indicator code points. An emoji with a skin tone is a base plus a modifier. é can be one code point or two — e plus a combining acute — and the two look identical while comparing as different strings. So the byte count here answers "how much space does this take", not "how many characters is this", and for the second question the answer depends on which of three definitions you meant.