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How to use the binary translator
Type in the box and the binary shows up while you type. To read binary, paste the 0s and 1s. The tool sees that it is binary and turns it back into text. If you type 0s and 1s yourself, it asks before it switches.
Swap puts the result in the box and turns it back, so you can check that nothing got lost. Letter by letter shows each character over its own bytes. Click a character there to see how its bits are built.
Binary from other places is often messy. The translator reads all of these. Press Try it to load one into the tool.
| You paste | You get | What is special | Load |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01001000 01101001 | Hi | Bytes with spaces, the usual way | |
| 0100100001101001 | Hi | No spaces: read 8 bits at a time | |
| 1001000 1101001 | Hi | 7 bits each, leading 0 left out | |
| 0100 1000 0110 1001 | Hi | Groups of 4 bits, read in pairs | |
| 11110000 10011111 10011000 10000000 | 😀 | One emoji, 4 bytes |
Commas, line breaks and a 0b in front of each byte are fine too. Hex and decimal bytes work when you pick them under Bytes as.
How binary counts: place values
Binary has only two digits, 0 and 1. Each digit is a bit. In our normal numbers each place is worth ten times the place to its right: ones, tens, hundreds. In binary each place is worth two times as much: 1, 2, 4, 8 and so on.
Eight bits make a byte. The places of a byte are worth 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2 and 1. Add up the places that hold a 1 and you get the number. 01000001 is 64 + 1, so it is 65. In text, 65 is the capital letter A.
01000001 = 64 + 1 = 65, the letter A
Jump to:
One byte holds a number from 0 (all bits off) to 255 (all bits on). That is 256 different values.
From letters to bytes: ASCII, 7 bits and 8 bits
A computer stores a letter as a number. The list that says which number means which letter is a character encoding. The first common one was ASCII, from 1963. It gives a number from 0 to 127 to each English letter, digit and sign. The ASCII table shows all 128.
127 fits in 7 bits, so ASCII is a 7 bit code. Computers store whole bytes, so in practice each letter gets 8 bits and the first bit is 0. That is why most binary messages have 8 digits per letter, and why they so often start with 01. Pick 7 bit ASCII in the tool if your teacher or puzzle uses 7 digits.
| Character | Number | 8 bits | 7 bits |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | 65 | 01000001 | 1000001 |
| B | 66 | 01000010 | 1000010 |
| a | 97 | 01100001 | 1100001 |
| b | 98 | 01100010 | 1100010 |
| 0 | 48 | 00110000 | 0110000 |
| Space | 32 | 00100000 | 0100000 |
| ! | 33 | 00100001 | 0100001 |
Look at A and a. They differ in one bit, the one worth 32. Every capital letter is 32 less than its small letter, so changing case in binary means flipping a single bit.
Emoji and accents: how UTF-8 builds bytes
ASCII has no é, no ü and no emoji. Unicode fixes that. It gives a number, called a code point, to every character in every script. There are more than 150,000 of them, so most need more than one byte. UTF-8 is the way to write those numbers as bytes. W3Techs counts it on 99.1% of websites (checked November 2026).
The first bits of each byte tell a program how to read it. A byte that starts with 0 is a whole character, the same as in ASCII. A byte that starts with 110, 1110 or 11110 starts a character of 2, 3 or 4 bytes. Each byte after it starts with 10. The bits that are left hold the code point. Type a character to see its bits moved into the bytes.
Try:
é is code point U+00E9, the number 233. UTF-8 writes it in 2 bytes.
The number in binary
00011101001
The bytes, with place values
hex C310101001128 + 32 + 8 + 1 = 169
hex A9
Gray bits are markers that tell a program how long the character is. The colored bits are the code point, cut into pieces and moved into the bytes in order.
The markers make UTF-8 safe to read. A program can start in the middle of a text and still find where each character begins. The full rules are on the Wikipedia page about UTF-8.
When binary will not turn back into text
Each byte between 0 and 127 is fine on its own. Bytes from 128 up must follow the marker rules, or they are not text. When that happens, the translator names the first bad byte and shows its bits. The broken parts show as �, the sign programs use for bytes they can't read.
The usual causes are a lost byte when copying, an extra or missing digit, or bits that were never text at all. When the binary has no spaces, one missing digit shifts every byte after it. The result then turns into strange signs or boxes from that point on.
| Binary | What is wrong | Load |
|---|---|---|
| 11000011 | Stops in the middle of a character | |
| 10101001 01101001 | Starts with a byte that only continues a character | |
| 010010000110100 | 15 bits with no spaces: no whole bytes |
Some old files use Windows-1252 instead of UTF-8. In that case é is one byte, 11101001, and UTF-8 can't read it alone. The translator offers to read the bytes that way instead.
Binary, hex and decimal
Binary, hex and decimal are three ways to write the same bytes. Hex uses 16 digits, 0 to 9 and A to F. One hex digit stands for 4 bits, so a byte is always two hex digits. Programmers like hex because it is short and still easy to turn into bits.
| Bytes as | The word Hi | Digits per byte |
|---|---|---|
| Binary | 01001000 01101001 | 8 |
| Hex | 48 69 | 2 |
| Decimal | 72 105 | 1 to 3 |
Binary is not a secret code. Anyone can paste it into a translator like this one. For Base64, URL encoding and other formats used in code, try the encoder and decoder. For a code you can tap, beep or blink with a light, try the Morse code translator.