Binary to Text Converter

What the binary to text converter does

This takes a string of 0s and 1s and turns it back into readable text. Paste the binary in, press the button, and copy out the characters it spells.

It is the reverse of writing text as binary. Where that hides your words inside a run of bits, this reads the bits back out, which is the part that feels a little like cracking a code.

How to use it

1. Enter your binary. Paste the 0s and 1s, for example 0100011101101111.
2. Press Convert. The decoded text appears in the output box.
3. Click the result to copy it. Tap the output to send it to your clipboard.

Press Reset to clear both boxes.

The byte is the unit you split on

The trick to reading binary text is knowing where one character ends and the next begins. The answer is always eight. Text is stored one byte per character, and a byte is eight bits, so the long run of bits is really a series of eight-bit blocks sitting side by side. To decode it, you cut the stream into groups of eight from the left, and each group is exactly one character.

The two decoding steps

Once you have a single eight-bit block, turning it into a character takes two small steps. First, read the eight bits as a binary number, which gives you a value somewhere from 0 to 255. Second, look up which character that number stands for, using the ASCII code that pairs numbers with characters: 72 is H, 105 is i, and so on. Do those two steps for every block in order, and the characters line up into your text.

A worked example with real bits

Take 0100011101101111. It is sixteen bits, so it splits into two bytes.

• 01000111 read as a number is 71, and 71 is the code for capital G.
• 01101111 read as a number is 111, and 111 is the code for lowercase o.

Put the characters in order and you get Go. The whole job was cutting the stream into eight-bit pieces, reading each as a number, and looking up its character.

Why a wall of bits is still readable

You might expect the bits to need spaces or markers between characters, but they do not, and the reason is the fixed width. Because every character is exactly eight bits, never more and never fewer, the boundaries are completely predictable: you cut every eight bits and you are right every time. That is what lets text be stored as one unbroken stream and still be decoded without any guesswork. It also means the binary should come in whole bytes, a length that is a multiple of eight.

Questions people ask

How do I decode binary into text?

Split the binary into groups of eight bits from the left, read each group as a number, and look up the character that number stands for in ASCII. The characters in order are your text.

Why split into groups of eight?

Because text is stored one byte per character, and a byte is eight bits. Each eight-bit block is exactly one character, so eight is where you cut.

What if the binary is not a multiple of eight?

Then it is not a clean set of whole bytes, and the last short piece will not map to a proper character. Binary text should arrive in full eight-bit bytes.

Which numbers map to which characters?

The ASCII standard sets the pairing: 65 is A, 97 is a, 48 is the digit 0, 32 is a space. Each eight-bit value points to one character through that table.

References

1. Cerf, V. ASCII format for Network Interchange. RFC 20, Internet Engineering Task Force. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc20
2. The Unicode Consortium. The Unicode Standard. https://www.unicode.org/standard/standard.html