Text to Binary

Text to binary, byte by byte

Binary is how computers store everything, including text. A text to binary conversion shows the bits behind each character: the tool encodes your text as UTF-8 and writes every byte as an 8-digit binary number, padded with leading zeros so each group has exactly eight bits.

Example

Input:

Hi there!

Output:

01001000 01101001 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 01110010 01100101 00100001

The letter H is 72 in decimal, which is 01001000 in binary: 64 + 8 = 72.

Reading a binary byte

Each position in a byte has a value, doubling from right to left:

Add up the values where the bit is 1 and you get the character code: 64 + 32 + 8 + 1 = 105 for “i”.

Beyond ASCII

ASCII characters fit in one byte and always start with 0. Other characters use two to four bytes in UTF-8, and each of those bytes starts with 1. For example, “é” becomes 11000011 10101001. The leading 110 marks the start of a two-byte sequence and 10 marks a continuation byte — a neat way to see UTF-8’s structure.

Separator options

• Space — the most readable form, one byte per group.
• None — a continuous bit stream, handy for puzzles or bit-level exercises.
• New line — one byte per line, easy to annotate or paste into a spreadsheet.

Text to binary in code

Python: ' '.join(f'{b:08b}' for b in 'Hi'.encode()). JavaScript: [...new TextEncoder().encode('Hi')].map(b => b.toString(2).padStart(8, '0')).join(' '). Both give the same result as this tool because they work on UTF-8 bytes.

Uses

Teaching how computers represent text, preparing puzzle or escape-room clues, creating binary-themed designs, and checking bit patterns in low-level programming. Binary is not encryption; anyone can translate it back.

Translate back with Binary to Text. For numbers rather than text, use Decimal to Binary, and for a per-character table with decimal, hex and binary, try Char to ASCII. The conversion runs in your browser.

How many bits does your text take?

Because the output shows every UTF-8 byte, you can read the storage size straight from it: count the groups and multiply by eight. “Hello” is 5 groups, or 40 bits. The count depends on the characters, not just their number:

JavaScript's charCodeAt works on UTF-16 instead and would describe the emoji as two 16-bit units, so its binary looks completely different. When results from a program disagree with this tool, check which encoding the program uses.