Convert binary to text and text to binary instantly. You can also convert decimal, octal and hexadecimal values using ASCII, UTF-8 and other character encodings.
Enter your values, choose the input and output formats, select a character encoding when working with text, and convert your data directly in your browser.
UTF-8 is recommended for most text. The selected encoding determines how text is converted to bytes and how bytes are decoded into characters.
Some legacy encodings support decoding only and depend on browser compatibility.
How binary represents text, how to convert by hand, and how to fix the most common problems.
Binary is a number system that uses only two digits, 0 and 1. Computers use it because their circuits have two states, on and off. Each 0 or 1 is called a bit, and eight bits make a byte. One byte can hold 256 different values, from 0 to 255.
Computers store text by giving every character a number and writing that number in binary. When you convert binary to text, you are reversing that process: reading the numbers and looking up which characters they stand for.
ASCII is the best-known mapping. It assigns the numbers 0 to 127 to English letters, digits, punctuation and a few control codes. For example, uppercase A is 65 and lowercase a is 97. The table below shows common characters in decimal, hexadecimal and 8-bit binary.
| Character | Decimal | Hex | Binary |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | 65 | 41 | 01000001 |
| B | 66 | 42 | 01000010 |
| H | 72 | 48 | 01001000 |
| a | 97 | 61 | 01100001 |
| z | 122 | 7A | 01111010 |
| 0 | 48 | 30 | 00110000 |
| 9 | 57 | 39 | 00111001 |
| Space | 32 | 20 | 00100000 |
| ! | 33 | 21 | 00100001 |
First, split the binary into groups of 8 bits. Second, convert each group to a decimal number by adding the place values 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2 and 1 wherever there is a 1. Third, look up the character for that number.
Example: 01001000 01101001
01001000 = 64 + 8 = 72, which is H
01101001 = 64 + 32 + 8 + 1 = 105, which is i
The text is Hi.
Going the other way, look up the number for each character and write it as 8 bits. The word Hello is made of the numbers 72, 101, 108, 108 and 111.
Example: Hello
H = 72 = 01001000
e = 101 = 01100101
l = 108 = 01101100 (twice)
o = 111 = 01101111
Hello = 01001000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111
ASCII only covers 128 characters, so it cannot represent accented letters, other alphabets or emoji. UTF-8 solves this by using one to four bytes per character. The first 128 characters are identical to ASCII, which is why plain English text looks the same in both.
Characters outside ASCII take more bytes. The letter é is two bytes (11000011 10101001), the euro sign € is three bytes (11100010 10000010 10101100), and most emoji are four bytes.
This converter also supports UTF-16 in little-endian and big-endian byte order and Windows-1252. Several ISO-8859 encodings are available for decoding binary into text. Choose the encoding the data was created with. The wrong encoding is the most common reason for garbled or invalid output.
The same value can be written in different number systems. The number 72, the letter H in ASCII, is 1001000 in binary, 110 in octal and 48 in hexadecimal. Programmers often use hexadecimal because two hex digits describe exactly one byte, which is shorter and easier to read than eight binary digits.
Select Binary as the input format and Text as the output format. Enter your binary values, select a character encoding such as UTF-8, and click Convert to view the readable text.
In ASCII and UTF-8, the uppercase letter H is represented by the 8-bit binary value 01001000. Its decimal value is 72 and its hexadecimal value is 48.
ASCII represents 128 standard characters, while UTF-8 supports Unicode characters from many languages. UTF-8 is backward-compatible with standard ASCII.
Yes. Select Text as the input format and Binary as the output format. Enter your text, choose a character encoding and click Convert.
Yes. You can convert between binary, decimal, octal, hexadecimal and text using the input and output format selectors.
This usually means the data was encoded with a different character encoding from the one selected. Try UTF-8 first, then the other encodings in the list.
Yes. You can use this online converter for free without creating an account.
Conversion is performed in your browser. Your entered values are not sent to the application server for conversion.
This converter supports five input and output formats for converting numerical data and text.
Separate numerical values using spaces, commas, semicolons, tabs or newlines. Binary prefix and suffix handling is available through the converter options.
The word Hello can be represented using different numerical formats. Here are its UTF-8 byte values.
| Format | Value |
|---|---|
| Text | Hello |
| Binary | 01001000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111 |
| Decimal | 72 101 108 108 111 |
| Octal | 110 145 154 154 157 |
| Hexadecimal | 48 65 6C 6C 6F |
Character encoding determines how text characters are represented as bytes and how those bytes are interpreted when converted back into text. UTF-8 is recommended for most modern applications because it supports Unicode characters from many languages. ASCII supports a smaller set of basic English characters, while UTF-16 and legacy encodings are useful for specific compatibility requirements.
Always use the same character encoding when encoding and decoding data. Selecting an incorrect encoding can produce unexpected characters or decoding errors.