Text to Binary & Back
Convert text to binary, hex, decimal or octal bytes, and back again, in UTF-8.
Processing: This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your input and any file you open stay on your device — nothing is uploaded to a server.
How to use the text to binary & back
- Choose a direction and a number base.
- Type or paste your text or byte values.
- Copy the result.
About this tool
Text is converted to UTF-8 bytes first, which is the detail most converters get wrong. In UTF-8 an ordinary English letter is one byte, an accented character is two, and most emoji are four — so the byte count regularly exceeds the character count.
Tools that treat one character as one byte produce output that looks plausible and decodes to nonsense the moment anything outside plain ASCII appears. This shows the real byte count alongside the character count so the difference is visible.
Decoding accepts values separated by spaces or commas, in whichever base you select.
Common uses
- Reading a binary or hex dump as text.
- Producing byte values for an exercise or a protocol.
- Checking how many bytes a string really takes.
Frequently asked questions
- Why is the byte count higher than the character count?
- UTF-8 uses one byte for ASCII, two for most accented letters and four for most emoji. Bytes and characters are not the same thing.
- Is this ASCII or UTF-8?
- UTF-8, which is a superset of ASCII. Plain English text produces identical results either way; anything else only works correctly in UTF-8.
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