Text to Binary

Type anything and get its bits — UTF-8 encoded, eight bits to a byte, with the multi-byte characters that break most converters handled properly.

Runs 100% in your browser•Nothing is uploaded to a server•Free forever

Text

Anything — accented characters and emoji included

Hello

Binary

Copied!

Text is not binary until you choose an encoding

A character is an idea; a byte is a number. Turning one into the other requires a rule, and the rule this page uses is UTF-8, which is what essentially every file, database and web page has used for years. Under UTF-8 the characters you can type on a US keyboard are one byte each and identical to ASCII, so H is 72 is 01001000. Anything outside that set costs two, three or four bytes.

Each byte is written as eight bits, most significant first, padded with leading zeros. That padding is not optional: 1001000 is only seven bits, and a decoder reading a stream eight bits at a time will fall out of step on the very next character.

Characters outside ASCII

Type an accented letter or an emoji above and watch the byte count go up. UTF-8 encodes a character's code point in one to four bytes, with the first byte declaring how many follow:

One character, several bytes
Character	What it is	Bytes	Binary
`é`	e with acute, U+00E9	2	`11000011 10101001`
`€`	euro sign, U+20AC	3	`11100010 10000010 10101100`
`日`	CJK for sun/day, U+65E5	3	`11100110 10010111 10100101`
`🐇`	rabbit, U+1F407	4	`11110000 10011111 10010000 10000111`

This is why "how many bits is a character?" has no single answer, and why a text field that allows 100 characters is not a database column of 100 bytes. It is also why binary produced from text on one machine and read on another matches only if both agree on the encoding — a string encoded as UTF-16 or Latin-1 will produce completely different bits for the same visible characters.

The ASCII table, in binary

For the one-byte range, the mapping is fixed and worth having in front of you. Note the structure: digits start at 0011 0000, uppercase at 0100 0001, lowercase exactly 32 higher at 0110 0001 — which is why flipping bit 5 changes a letter's case.

Every printable ASCII character as eight bits
Character	Decimal	Binary
`space`	32	`00100000`
`!`	33	`00100001`
`"`	34	`00100010`
`#`	35	`00100011`
`$`	36	`00100100`
`%`	37	`00100101`
`&`	38	`00100110`
`'`	39	`00100111`
`(`	40	`00101000`
`)`	41	`00101001`
`*`	42	`00101010`
`+`	43	`00101011`
`,`	44	`00101100`
`-`	45	`00101101`
`.`	46	`00101110`
`/`	47	`00101111`
`0`	48	`00110000`
`1`	49	`00110001`
`2`	50	`00110010`
`3`	51	`00110011`
`4`	52	`00110100`
`5`	53	`00110101`
`6`	54	`00110110`
`7`	55	`00110111`
`8`	56	`00111000`
`9`	57	`00111001`
`:`	58	`00111010`
`;`	59	`00111011`
`<`	60	`00111100`
`=`	61	`00111101`
`>`	62	`00111110`
`?`	63	`00111111`
`@`	64	`01000000`
`A`	65	`01000001`
`B`	66	`01000010`
`C`	67	`01000011`
`D`	68	`01000100`
`E`	69	`01000101`
`F`	70	`01000110`
`G`	71	`01000111`
`H`	72	`01001000`
`I`	73	`01001001`
`J`	74	`01001010`
`K`	75	`01001011`
`L`	76	`01001100`
`M`	77	`01001101`
`N`	78	`01001110`
`O`	79	`01001111`
`P`	80	`01010000`
`Q`	81	`01010001`
`R`	82	`01010010`
`S`	83	`01010011`
`T`	84	`01010100`
`U`	85	`01010101`
`V`	86	`01010110`
`W`	87	`01010111`
`X`	88	`01011000`
`Y`	89	`01011001`
`Z`	90	`01011010`
`[`	91	`01011011`
`\`	92	`01011100`
`]`	93	`01011101`
`^`	94	`01011110`
`_`	95	`01011111`
`	96	`01100000`
`a`	97	`01100001`
`b`	98	`01100010`
`c`	99	`01100011`
`d`	100	`01100100`
`e`	101	`01100101`
`f`	102	`01100110`
`g`	103	`01100111`
`h`	104	`01101000`
`i`	105	`01101001`
`j`	106	`01101010`
`k`	107	`01101011`
`l`	108	`01101100`
`m`	109	`01101101`
`n`	110	`01101110`
`o`	111	`01101111`
`p`	112	`01110000`
`q`	113	`01110001`
`r`	114	`01110010`
`s`	115	`01110011`
`t`	116	`01110100`
`u`	117	`01110101`
`v`	118	`01110110`
`w`	119	`01110111`
`x`	120	`01111000`
`y`	121	`01111001`
`z`	122	`01111010`
`{`	123	`01111011`
`\|`	124	`01111100`
`}`	125	`01111101`
`~`	126	`01111110`

Related: binary to text for the return trip, text to hex when the binary is too long to read, and the number base converter for plain numbers rather than text.