Binary Translator

How to use this binary translator

The translator at the top of this page works in both directions and needs no button. Follow these three steps:

1. Type or paste your input. Enter text or binary code in the left box. The translator detects which one you pasted, or you can choose Text → Binary or Binary → Text yourself.
2. Read the result as you type. The translation updates with every keystroke. For text to binary you can switch the output to octal, decimal or hex, pick a separator, and choose UTF-8 or ASCII.
3. Copy, download or share. Copy the result with one click (or Ctrl/⌘ + Enter), download it as a .txt file, or copy a link that reopens the same conversion.

If part of your input can’t be converted, the translator tells you which group is wrong and why, and still converts everything else. The character breakdown under the result shows each character’s code point and bytes, with every bit drawn as a cell, so you can check the translation by hand.

What is a binary translator?

A binary translator converts binary code, strings of 0s and 1s, into readable text, and converts text back into binary. Each group of eight binary digits (bits) is one byte. A byte stands for a number from 0 to 255, and a character encoding such as ASCII or UTF-8 maps those numbers to letters, digits, punctuation and emoji.

People use a binary translator to decode a message written in 0s and 1s, to solve puzzles and capture-the-flag challenges, to check homework in computer science classes, or simply to see what their name looks like in binary. Programmers use it to inspect the raw bytes behind a piece of text, for example to spot an invisible character or an encoding problem.

Binary is not a language like English, so “translating” binary really means decoding it. The same bits can mean different things depending on how they are read: 01000001 is the number 65, the letter A in ASCII, or part of an image. This tool reads binary as text, which is what almost everyone searching for a binary translator wants.

How to convert binary to text

To convert binary to text by hand, split the binary into groups of 8 bits, turn each group into a decimal number, and look that number up in an ASCII table. Let’s decode 01001000 01101001.

Each position in a byte has a place value. From left to right the values are 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2 and 1. Wherever a bit is 1, you add that place value; wherever it is 0, you skip it.

The first byte adds up to 72, which is the ASCII code for a capital H. The second adds up to 105, the code for a lowercase i. Together they spell “Hi”. A translator does exactly this, just for thousands of bytes at once.

A few practical tips help when you decode by hand. If a group has fewer than 8 digits, add zeros on the left until it does, so 1001000 becomes 01001000. If the binary has no spaces, count off 8 digits at a time from the left. If the numbers you get are above 127, the text probably uses UTF-8 and some characters span several bytes.

How to convert text to binary

Converting text to binary is the same process in reverse. For each character, find its code, then write that number using the place values from largest to smallest.

1. Find the character’s code. The capital letter A is 65.
2. Take the largest place value that fits. 64 fits into 65, so the 64 bit is 1 and 1 is left over.
3. Keep going down the place values. Only the 1 bit fits what is left, so the byte is 01000001.
4. Repeat for every character, including spaces, which are code 32 (00100000).

Notice that uppercase and lowercase letters differ by exactly one bit. A is 01000001 and a is 01100001: the 32 bit switches the case. That is why the binary alphabet below looks so regular.

ASCII, UTF-8 and why emoji take four bytes

ASCII is the original character code from the 1960s. It defines 128 characters, codes 0 to 127: English letters, digits, punctuation and a few control codes such as the new line. Every ASCII character fits in one byte, and its first bit is always 0.

UTF-8 is the encoding the web uses today. It is fully compatible with ASCII, so plain English text is identical in both. For everything else it uses more bytes: two for most accented Latin letters such as é, three for Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters, and four for most emoji. The first bits of each byte tell a decoder how many bytes belong together.

This translator uses UTF-8 by default, so you can convert any language or emoji and get the exact same text back. Switch the encoding to ASCII if an assignment asks for strict 7-bit ASCII; the tool then points out any character that ASCII can’t represent.

Binary alphabet: A to Z in binary

Here is every letter of the English alphabet in 8-bit binary, uppercase and lowercase. The first three bits are 010 for capitals and 011 for lowercase letters; the last five bits count the letter’s position, from 1 for A to 26 for Z.

Digits are characters too, and they are not the same as their numeric value. The character “0” is code 48, so in text it is written 00110000, and “9” is 00111001.

For every printable character, including punctuation and symbols, see the full ASCII binary table.

Common words and phrases in binary

These are some of the words people most often look up in binary. Each one was generated by the same code the translator uses, so you can paste any of them above to check.

What do 10101, 01011 and other short binary codes mean?

Short codes such as 10101 or 01011 are not full bytes, so they don’t map to a character on their own. They usually mean one of two things. Read as a plain binary number, 10101 is 21. In many puzzles, though, five-bit codes stand for a letter’s position in the alphabet, where A is 1 and Z is 26. In that system 10101 is the letter U.

If a message is made of 5-digit groups, try the letter column first. If it is made of 8-digit groups, paste it into the translator, which reads it as ASCII or UTF-8 text.

Why do computers use binary?

Computers use binary because their hardware has two reliable states. A transistor is either conducting or not, a voltage is high or low, and a spot on a disk is magnetized one way or the other. Two states are easy to tell apart even with electrical noise, which makes binary fast, cheap and dependable.

Everything a computer stores is ultimately bits: text, numbers, photos, music and the programs themselves. What changes is how those bits are interpreted. Text is just the case where an agreed table, such as ASCII or Unicode, says which number stands for which character.

Bits, bytes and other number bases

A few terms come up again and again when you work with binary:

• Bit: a single binary digit, 0 or 1.
• Nibble: 4 bits, which is exactly one hexadecimal digit.
• Byte: 8 bits, enough for 256 values (0 to 255).
• Hexadecimal: base 16, written with 0–9 and A–F. Two hex digits make one byte, so 01001000 is 48 in hex.
• Octal: base 8. Each octal digit stands for 3 bits; the letter H is 110 in octal.
• Decimal: the everyday base 10, so H is 72.

Programmers often prefer hex because it is shorter than binary yet still lines up with the bits. This translator can output text as binary, octal, decimal or hex, and can read any of them back into text.

Frequently asked questions