Text to Binary Converter

Convert text to binary (0s and 1s) and binary back to text. Supports multiple output formats.

Common ASCII Values

Char Dec Binary Hex Char Dec Binary Hex

How Text-to-Binary Works

Every character you type is stored as a number. The ASCII standard assigns numbers 0–127 to common English characters, digits, and symbols. When you convert text to binary, each character's decimal code is expressed in base-2 (using only the digits 0 and 1), padded to 8 bits.

For example: the letter H is ASCII code 72. 72 in binary is 01001000. The word “Hello” becomes 01001000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111.

Number Systems at a Glance

  • Binary (base-2): digits 0–1 — as used by computers
  • Octal (base-8): digits 0–7 — used in Unix file permissions
  • Decimal (base-10): digits 0–9 — standard human notation
  • Hex (base-16): digits 0–9 plus A–F — compact notation for bytes

Frequently Asked Questions

How does text to binary conversion work?

Each character has a numeric code point. For example, "A" is 65 in decimal. Binary conversion takes that number and expresses it in base-2: 65 becomes 01000001.

Why are binary groups 8 bits long?

A group of 8 bits is a byte. Bytes can represent 256 values (0–255), enough for ASCII and extended character sets. Computers are byte-addressable — memory addresses point to individual bytes.

What is the difference between ASCII and UTF-8?

ASCII covers 128 characters (English letters, digits, symbols). UTF-8 uses 1–4 bytes per character to encode all Unicode characters including emoji and non-Latin scripts. For the 128 base ASCII characters, UTF-8 and ASCII produce identical byte values.

What are practical uses for text-to-binary conversion?

Primarily for learning how computers represent data, debugging encoding issues, understanding bitwise operations, network protocol analysis, computer science education, and CTF competitions.