Free ASCII to Binary Converter

What Is an ASCII to Binary Converter?

Quick answer: An ASCII to binary converter takes each character's numeric ASCII code and writes it as eight 0s and 1s. Press Convert to Binary and capital A, code 65, becomes 01000001.

Try it with your own text first. For accents or emoji, use the Text to Binary converter listed at the end.

How to Convert ASCII to Binary With This Tool

1. Add text. Paste text into the box titled "Enter or paste your Ascii", or choose a .txt file with Upload File.
2. Convert. Press Convert to Binary and the Result card appears.
3. Read the bits. Each character gets one 8-bit group of binary digits, separated by single spaces. A line break is its own group, 00001010.
4. Take the result. Copy to Clipboard copies the bits with no extra markup; Save as TXT downloads ascii-to-binary.txt.

Tip: The input is trimmed first, so spaces and tabs at the edges are dropped: two leading spaces and a trailing tab around the letter a still produce only 01100001. Spaces inside the text print as 00100000, the space character.

ASCII to Binary Examples

The 8-bit column is tool output, and we recomputed every row in Python. The 7-bit column is what the ASCII standard itself needs, padded to seven digits; the tool never prints it.

Hi becomes 01001000 01101001, and ASCII runs to five groups starting 01000001 01010011. Paste any character from the table into the box and check that your output matches its 8-bit cell. For line feed, press Enter.

ASCII Table: Codes 0 to 127 and the 7-Bit vs 8-Bit Question

RFC 20, the ASCII format, defines 128 codes, numbered 0 to 127, which fit in 7 bits. 33 of them are control codes: 0 to 31 (tab and carriage return live here) plus 127, delete. The other 95 printable characters, codes 32 to 126, include punctuation.

Landmarks: space is 32, digits run 48 to 57, uppercase letters 65 to 90, lowercase letters 97 to 122. A lowercase letter is its capital plus exactly 32. Other codes are in the Unicode Basic Latin chart.

Why eight digits for a 7-bit code? Storage works in an 8-bit byte, one byte per character, so zero padding adds a leading zero: 1000001 becomes 01000001. Files hold that padded byte, so we print it. For the division, try the Decimal to Binary converter.

What Happens to Characters Above 127?

ASCII ends at 127, so accents and emoji are not ASCII characters. The tool does not use a code page. It writes the UTF-8 bytes of each code point instead, as RFC 3629, the UTF-8 specification, describes.

The letter e with an acute accent comes out as 11000011 10101001, two groups. A Latin-1 code page would give one byte, 11101001, so a converter built on a code page will disagree with ours.

For code points up to 127, UTF-8 matches ASCII byte for byte. Above that, one character takes two to four groups. The Chinese character zhong (中) comes out as three, a grinning emoji as four.

Limits, Uploads and Privacy

Every conversion runs on our server: pressing Convert sends one POST to this page, so your text reaches us before you see a bit. Our visit log stores option settings, not the text you paste. Keep passwords and other secrets out of the box.

Guests get 100 words per conversion and a free account gets 1,000 words, for typed text and files alike. A hard cap of of about 200,000 characters also applies. Uploads must be .txt, and typed text beats a chosen file.

Related Converters

See all Binary Converter tools.

• Text to Binary converter: accents and emoji.
• Binary to ASCII converter: the reverse.
• Binary to Text converter: reads spaced or unspaced streams.
• Text to ASCII converter: decimal codes.
• Hex to Binary converter: base 16 input.
• Binary to Decimal converter: 01000001 is 65.
• Binary to Hex converter: shorter strings.