Text to Binary Converter

What the text to binary converter does

This turns ordinary text into binary, the 0s and 1s a computer actually stores. Type a word or sentence in, press the button, and copy out the binary.

It is the rawest way to see what your text really is inside a machine. Underneath every letter you type, there is a string of bits, and this shows them to you directly.

How to use it

1. Enter your text. Type anything, for example Hi.
2. Press Convert. The binary 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.

Every character is a number first

A computer does not store the shape of a letter. It stores a number. Every character, every letter, digit, space, and punctuation mark, is assigned a number called its code, fixed by an agreed standard so that every machine uses the same one. For the basic English set, that standard is ASCII, and a few codes are worth knowing: capital A is 65, lowercase a is 97, the digit 0 is 48, and a space is 32.

So turning text into binary is really a two-part idea. First, look up each character's number. Then, write that number in binary. The tool does both for you, character by character.

Eight bits to a character

Basic ASCII only needs seven bits, since seven bits cover the 128 codes it defines. But computers store data in bytes, and a byte is eight bits, so each character is written as a full eight bits, with a leading 0 added to fill the byte. That is why every character in the output is exactly eight digits long.

The tool runs those bytes together into one long string with no gaps between them. So to read the binary back into text, you split it into chunks of eight from the left, and turn each eight-bit chunk back into its character.

A worked example with real letters

Take the word Hi. It has two characters, so we handle each one.

• H has the code 72. In eight bits that is 01001000.
• i has the code 105. In eight bits that is 01101001.

Run the two bytes together and you get 0100100001101001. That is Hi in binary. Notice each character became its own neat eight-bit block, and the blocks simply sit side by side.

A neat detail: the case of a letter is one bit

Here is a small thing that is rather lovely. Capital A is 65, which is 01000001, and lowercase a is 97, which is 01100001. Look closely and only one bit differs between them, the third from the left. The gap between any capital letter and its lowercase version is always exactly 32, a single bit flipping on or off. That is not an accident, it was designed that way so a computer can switch a letter's case by touching just one bit.

Beyond English: Unicode

ASCII covers English letters, digits, and common symbols, and that is all it was built for. The moment you want an accented letter like é, a character from another script, or an emoji, you have gone past ASCII into Unicode, the much larger standard that gives a code to characters from nearly every writing system in the world. Those codes are bigger numbers, and they take more than one byte to store. Helpfully, the first 128 Unicode codes are exactly the ASCII codes, so plain English text comes out the same either way.

Questions people ask

How does text turn into binary?

Each character is looked up to find its numeric code, and that code is written in binary as eight bits. Do this for every character and join the results, and you have the text in binary.

Why is each character eight bits?

Because computers store data in bytes, and a byte is eight bits. Basic ASCII needs only seven, so a leading 0 is added to fill out the byte, which keeps every character the same width.

How do I turn the binary back into text?

Split the binary into groups of eight bits from the left, turn each group into its number, then look up the character for that number. Each eight-bit group is one character.

What about accents and emoji?

Those live in Unicode rather than basic ASCII, so they use larger codes and take more than one byte. Plain English letters match in both standards, since ASCII forms the first part of Unicode.

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