Free Text to Binary Converter

Type or paste any text and this converter turns it into binary code instantly: each letter, number, space and symbol becomes an 8-bit byte. Use it as a free text to binary translator or binary code generator for English words, names or whole messages. To turn binary back into text, use the binary code translator.

How to convert text to binary in 3 steps

To convert text to binary, find each character’s code number (H = 72), then write that number in base 2 using eight digits (72 = 01001000). Repeat for every character, including spaces. The converter above does this instantly for any English words or symbols.

1. Type or paste your text. Single words, full sentences, names, numbers and emoji all work, so you can convert words to binary or drop in a whole paragraph. One thing to check: a stray space or line break at the end of what you copied gets encoded too, as an extra byte you didn’t ask for.
2. Pick a separator. A space between bytes is the easiest to read, and it’s the safest choice if someone will decode the message later. The table further down covers the other options.
3. Copy or download the binary. Every character shows up as 8 digits of 0s and 1s. For long text, the .txt download beats selecting a wall of digits by hand.

English to binary example: “Hi” letter by letter

Every character has a code number. Capital H is 72 and lowercase i is 105. Those numbers come from ASCII, first published in 1963 and given its lowercase letters in 1967. Unicode still uses all 128 ASCII characters unchanged, which is why English to binary code looks the same in almost every tool. The binary to ASCII converter shows the code for any character. For ready-made words such as hello and I love you, copy them from words in binary.

How 72 becomes 01001000: write out the eight place values of a byte, 128 · 64 · 32 · 16 · 8 · 4 · 2 · 1, and put a 1 under each value you need to reach 72. That’s 64 + 8, so H = 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0.

Add a space after “Hi” and you get a third byte, 00100000. Spaces count. (Test any converter with this: “Hi” should give exactly two bytes. A third byte, 00100000, means a trailing space slipped in.)

A small pattern you’ll start to spot: capital letters begin with 010 and lowercase letters begin with 011. Look up every letter’s code in the binary alphabet.

Why every character is 8 digits

Computers store text in bytes, and a byte is 8 bits. Lowercase “d” is 100, which in binary is only 1100100 (seven digits). The converter pads it with a leading zero to make 01100100. Without that padding, a decoder can’t tell where one letter stops and the next starts, which is why text to 8 bit binary output always comes in neat groups of eight.

Spaces, no spaces or new lines: separator options

Most converters offer a separator setting and never explain it. Here’s when to use each one:

We’d keep the space unless you have a reason not to. “No separator” looks cleaner, but one dropped digit shifts every byte after it and the whole message turns to nonsense.

Want to see how each byte is built? Work it out by hand.

Accents, emoji and other languages (UTF-8)

Plain English letters take one byte each. Anything outside basic English needs more, because UTF-8 uses between one and four bytes per character (RFC 3629).

So “café” comes out as five bytes, not four. ASCII mode only covers the basic 128 characters (RFC 20), so leave the converter on UTF-8 if your text has accents, other alphabets or emoji.

Text to binary vs number to binary

Type “5” here and you get 00110101. That’s the code for the character 5 (code 53). The number five in binary is just 101.

This page encodes text, so it always treats digits as characters. “2026” typed here becomes four bytes, one per digit, the same way a word does.

Frequently asked questions

' '.join(format(b, '08b') for b in text.encode('utf-8'))

[...new TextEncoder().encode(t)].map(b => b.toString(2).padStart(8, '0')).join(' ')

Sources: RFC 3629, UTF-8 · RFC 20, ASCII format for network interchange