Text to Binary Converter
See how computers store your words. Type any text and get its binary representation, eight bits per byte, with full support for accented letters, non-Latin scripts and emoji.
- Runs in your browser
- No sign-up
- Free to use
How to use Text to Binary
- Type or paste text into the left box.
- Choose what goes between bytes: a space, nothing, a new line or a comma.
- The binary code appears instantly on the right.
- Copy it or download it as a text file.
Text to Binary features
8-bit bytes
Every byte is shown as eight binary digits with leading zeros.
UTF-8 encoding
Works for every language and emoji, not just English letters.
Separator choice
Spaces for readability, or a continuous stream of bits.
Live conversion
Updates as you type.
Byte count
Shows how many bytes the text occupies.
Runs in your browser
Nothing is uploaded.
When to use Text to Binary
- Learning how text is represented in computers.
- Creating binary messages for puzzles, games and T-shirts.
- Teaching computing lessons on bits and bytes.
- Checking the byte representation of special characters.
- Generating test data for binary parsers.
Text to Binary FAQ
How is text converted to binary?
Each character is first turned into one or more bytes using the UTF-8 encoding. Each byte, a number from 0 to 255, is then written in base 2 using eight digits. The letter A is byte 65, which is 01000001.
Why do some characters produce more than eight bits?
UTF-8 uses one byte for basic English characters and two to four bytes for others. The letter é is two bytes, most Chinese characters are three, and emoji are four.
Is binary the same as ASCII?
ASCII is a table assigning numbers to 128 characters. Binary is a way of writing numbers. For English text, UTF-8 bytes equal ASCII codes, so the binary is the same.
What does 01001000 01101001 mean?
It spells “Hi”: 01001000 is 72, the code for H, and 01101001 is 105, the code for i.
How do I convert back?
Use the Binary to Text converter.
How many bits does my text use?
Each byte is eight bits, and the byte count is shown under the output. Plain English text uses one byte per character, so a 100-character sentence is 800 bits. Accented letters use two bytes, most Asian characters three and emoji four, so the same number of characters can need more bits.
Bits, bytes and characters
Computers store everything as bits, which can be 0 or 1. Eight bits form a byte, which can represent 256 different values. Text is stored by agreeing on a table that maps characters to numbers; the numbers are then stored as bytes.
The first widely used table was ASCII, published in 1963, which assigned the numbers 0 to 127 to English letters, digits, punctuation and control codes. Capital A is 65, lower-case a is 97, and the space is 32. Written in binary, 65 is 01000001: one 64 plus one 1.
ASCII cannot represent the world’s languages, so Unicode assigns a number to every character in every script, over 150,000 so far. UTF-8 is the dominant way to store those numbers: it keeps ASCII characters as single bytes and uses sequences of two to four bytes for everything else. That is why this converter can turn any text into binary, and why non-English characters produce more bits.
Reading binary is simple once you know the place values: from right to left, each digit is worth 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 and 128. Add the values where a 1 appears to get the byte’s number.