This free text to binary converter turns any text into the 8-bit binary a computer actually stores. Type or paste into the box above and the binary appears immediately, grouped into bytes and separated by spaces. You can copy the result with one click or save it as a text file.
It handles full UTF-8, which matters more than it sounds. Accented letters, emoji, Chinese, Arabic, and every other script convert correctly here, where converters built around plain ASCII either mangle them or refuse them outright. Pasted text is converted inside your browser using the browser's TextEncoder API, so there is no length limit and your text is never sent anywhere.
How to Convert Text to Binary
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Enter your text. Type it in or paste it into the box above. There is no length limit on pasted text.
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Convert. Your text is turned into 8-bit binary groups, one group per byte, separated by spaces.
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Copy or save. Use Copy to send the binary to your clipboard, or Save As Txt to download it as a file.
You can also upload a .txt file instead of pasting. File uploads are processed on our server rather than in your browser, and they carry a word limit that is higher when you are signed in.
How Text Becomes Binary
Computers do not store letters. They store numbers, and every number is ultimately a run of ones and zeros. Converting text to binary is a two-step translation: each character is mapped to one or more byte values, and each byte is written out as 8 binary digits.
Take the word Hi. The letter H has the byte value 72, which in binary is 01001000. The letter i has the value 105, which is 01101001. Put them together and Hi becomes:
01001000 01101001
Every group is padded to a full 8 bits, so a value like 3 is written as 00000011 rather than just 11. That fixed width is what makes the binary readable back into text, because a decoder knows exactly where each byte starts and ends.
Why Some Characters Take More Than 8 Bits
Here is where most converters quietly go wrong. UTF-8 is a variable-length encoding, which means a character is not always one byte. Basic English letters, digits, and punctuation take one byte each. Accented characters take two. Most CJK characters take three. Emoji take four. Each of those bytes becomes its own 8-bit group, so the binary for an emoji is four times longer than the binary for the letter A.
| Character |
Bytes |
Bits |
Binary |
| A |
1 |
8 |
01000001 |
| é |
2 |
16 |
11000011 10101001 |
| 中 |
3 |
24 |
11100100 10111000 10101101 |
| 😀 |
4 |
32 |
11110000 10011111 10011000 10000000 |
This is the usual answer to "why is my binary longer than I expected." If your text contains anything outside the basic Latin set, the byte count grows, and so does the binary. The exact rules for how many bytes each character takes are set out in RFC 3629, the UTF-8 specification.
ASCII and UTF-8: What Changed
ASCII arrived in 1963 and covered 128 characters in 7 bits: the English alphabet in both cases, the digits, and common punctuation. Extended ASCII later pushed that to 256 characters using a full 8 bits, which added some accented letters but still could not cover the world's writing systems.
Unicode was introduced in 1991 to give every character in every script a unique number, and it now covers well over a hundred thousand of them. UTF-8 is the encoding that turns those Unicode numbers into bytes, and its clever part is backward compatibility: for the first 128 characters, UTF-8 output is byte-for-byte identical to ASCII. That is why the word Hello looks exactly the same whether you call it ASCII or UTF-8, and why converters that only understand ASCII appear to work fine until someone types a name with an accent in it. For the background on how the standard fits together, the Unicode Consortium's overview of Unicode is the primary source.
This converter uses UTF-8 with no encoding selector, because UTF-8 is the correct default for text on the modern web and it covers the ASCII range identically.
Binary Reference Table
Some characters come up often enough to be worth having to hand:
| Character |
Binary |
Character |
Binary |
| A |
01000001 |
a |
01100001 |
| B |
01000010 |
b |
01100010 |
| Z |
01011010 |
z |
01111010 |
| 0 |
00110000 |
9 |
00111001 |
| space |
00100000 |
! |
00100001 |
| . |
00101110 |
? |
00111111 |
Where Text to Binary Conversion Is Used
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Learning how computers work. Seeing a familiar word turn into ones and zeros is the clearest way to understand that all text is really numbers, which is why this is a staple of computer science coursework.
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Debugging encoding problems. When text arrives garbled, comparing the actual bytes against what you expected usually shows whether the wrong encoding was applied somewhere in the chain.
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Low-level and embedded work. Protocols, firmware, and hardware interfaces often deal in raw bytes, and seeing the binary directly helps when you are matching a spec.
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Puzzles and CTF challenges. Binary strings are a common way to hide a message, and converting them is often the first step in solving one.
Converting Binary Back to Text
Going the other way is just as easy. Paste your space-separated 8-bit groups into our free binary to text converter and it reassembles the original text, including any accented characters and emoji. Anything converted here will round-trip back exactly, because both tools use the same UTF-8 byte encoding.
Related Converters
This tool is part of a family of base and encoding converters. If you are working specifically within the ASCII range, try the ASCII to binary converter. If you need hexadecimal instead, the binary to hex converter handles that conversion.
