Binary translator
Turn text into 8-bit binary code or decode 0s and 1s back into words. Runs in your browser, instantly.
How eight bits make a letter
Each position in a byte is worth double the one to its right: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128. A 1 means “count this”, a 0 means “skip it”. Add up the counted places and you have a number from 0 to 255.
Text encodings then agree which number means which character. In ASCII, 65 is A, 97 is a, 48 is the digit 0 and 32 is a space. Flip the bits in the byte demo and watch the letter change; turning the 32 bit on and off switches between upper and lower case.
Flip a single bit, the one worth 32, and A (01000001) becomes a (01100001): one small switch, a visibly different result. The Moon manages something similar with no switch at all, and ahaboo narrates why it has phases.
64 + 1 = 65
- Decimal
- 65
- Hex
- 41
- Character
- A
Binary code alphabet
| Letter | Uppercase | Lowercase |
|---|---|---|
| A / a | 01000001 | 01100001 |
| B / b | 01000010 | 01100010 |
| C / c | 01000011 | 01100011 |
| D / d | 01000100 | 01100100 |
| E / e | 01000101 | 01100101 |
| F / f | 01000110 | 01100110 |
| G / g | 01000111 | 01100111 |
| H / h | 01001000 | 01101000 |
| I / i | 01001001 | 01101001 |
| J / j | 01001010 | 01101010 |
| K / k | 01001011 | 01101011 |
| L / l | 01001100 | 01101100 |
| M / m | 01001101 | 01101101 |
| N / n | 01001110 | 01101110 |
| O / o | 01001111 | 01101111 |
| P / p | 01010000 | 01110000 |
| Q / q | 01010001 | 01110001 |
| R / r | 01010010 | 01110010 |
| S / s | 01010011 | 01110011 |
| T / t | 01010100 | 01110100 |
| U / u | 01010101 | 01110101 |
| V / v | 01010110 | 01110110 |
| W / w | 01010111 | 01110111 |
| X / x | 01011000 | 01111000 |
| Y / y | 01011001 | 01111001 |
| Z / z | 01011010 | 01111010 |
Questions people ask
How do I convert binary to text?
Paste the binary into the box. Split it into groups of 8 bits (one byte) with spaces, or paste one long string whose length is a multiple of 8. Each byte is read as a number and decoded as UTF-8, so plain English letters, accented characters and emoji all work.
What is "A" in binary?
Capital A is 01000001, which is 65 in decimal. Lowercase a is 01100001 (97). The only difference between the two is the bit worth 32, which is true for every letter in ASCII.
Why do some characters take more than 8 bits?
ASCII only defines 128 characters. Everything else, such as é, ß, Chinese characters or emoji, is stored as UTF-8, which uses 2 to 4 bytes per character. é becomes 11000011 10101001.
Is binary code a language?
No. Binary is a way of writing numbers with only two digits. Text becomes binary when each character is given a number by an encoding such as ASCII or UTF-8, and that number is written in base 2.
Working with hexadecimal instead? The hex to text converter uses the same bytes, written four bits per digit.