Text & language
Binary ↔ Text Converter
Your text in 0s and 1s — and back — exactly the way a computer sees it.
Behind every letter on your screen sit bytes: eight bits, zeros and ones. This converter makes that machinery visible. Type some text and it appears in binary, one eight-bit byte per group, separated by spaces; paste a string of 0s and 1s and the tool detects the direction on its own and rebuilds the text — even without spaces, as long as the length divides into groups of eight. The encoding is UTF-8, the standard of the web: accented letters and special characters span several bytes, and the tool handles that faithfully in both directions. Great for understanding character encoding, building a classroom exercise or decoding a geeky message. Free and instant.
How does it work?
- Type your text — or paste binary; the direction is detected automatically.
- The conversion appears live, one 8-bit byte per encoded character.
- Copy the result with one click.
Frequently asked questions
Why is each character 8 bits long?
The byte — eight bits — is the basic unit of computer memory: it offers 256 combinations, enough for the whole Latin alphabet, digits and punctuation of the historic ASCII table. Characters beyond that (accents, ideograms, emojis) are encoded in UTF-8 across two, three or four consecutive bytes.
Why does “é” produce two bytes instead of one?
Because in UTF-8 only the first 128 ASCII characters fit in a single byte. “é” is encoded as two bytes: 11000011 10101001. That compromise lets UTF-8 represent over a million characters while staying backward-compatible with ASCII — which is why it powers virtually the entire web.
How do I decode binary to text by hand?
Split the string into groups of eight bits, convert each group to decimal (the leftmost bit is worth 128, then 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1), then look the number up in an ASCII table: 01001111 = 79 = “O”. Tedious but instructive — and this tool does it for you in a fraction of a second.
Binary, ASCII, UTF-8 — what is the difference?
Binary is just notation in 0s and 1s; ASCII and UTF-8 are conventions that map numbers to characters. ASCII (1963) covers 128 English characters; UTF-8 (1993) contains ASCII and extends the idea to every writing system on Earth. This converter uses UTF-8, so your accents survive the round trip.