Text to Binary Converter
See how text is stored as bits. Every character is encoded in UTF-8, the encoding used by the web, and each byte is written as eight binary digits. Letters A to Z take one byte, accented letters two, and most emoji four, which you can see clearly with the per-character layout.
Convert Text to Binary
Binary
Size
How to Use the Text to Binary
- Type or paste your text.
- Choose a layout: bytes separated by spaces, grouped per character, one per line, or one long string.
- Copy or download the binary.
About This Tool
Students learning how computers represent text, teachers preparing exercises, and developers checking the exact bytes of a string.
Input: Plain text · Output: Binary (0 and 1).
Features and Limitations
Features
- True UTF-8 encoding, so any character in any language works.
- Four layouts, including grouping by character to show multi-byte characters.
- Optional 0b prefix for programming use.
- Shows the number of characters, bytes and bits.
Limitations
- Only UTF-8 is produced; legacy encodings such as Windows-1252 or UTF-16 are not available.
- Line breaks are encoded too (as 00001010), so remove them first if you only want the visible text.
- Results are computed in your browser; nothing you enter is sent to a server.
Example
“Hi!” becomes 01001000 01101001 00100001, and “é” becomes 11000011 10101001 (two bytes).
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this ASCII or UTF-8?
UTF-8. For the 128 ASCII characters (English letters, digits and basic punctuation) UTF-8 and ASCII give identical bytes.
Why do some characters have more than 8 bits?
UTF-8 uses one to four bytes per character. Characters outside ASCII, such as é, € or emoji, need two, three or four bytes.
How do I convert binary back to text?
Use the Binary to Text Converter, which accepts any of the layouts produced here.
How is a space encoded?
A space is 00100000 (decimal 32).
Related Tools
More like this: all Encoding & Ciphers tools, all Text & Writing tools or the TinySandy home page.